Tim
Life is good Joined: Nov 2007
Location: Kalamazoo

The last week or two I've been working on a fork of the code for this site. It's devoted to just the image processing. Of course this fork goes hand in hand with the site as well. Here's what I've done.

Previosuly all the images, scripts, and HTML were being sent down the pipe from the same domain; http://timmeers.net. Because of this all the content needed to be downloaded at the same two by two because the browser is only able to download two things at once from the same domain at the same time. So I've added a new setting in the app that allows the host to add a dedicated "content delevery network" (CDN) URL into the mix.

Of course some of this needs to be completed on the server and DNS levels so I've added images.timmeers.net as a new CNAME. This of course points to the same A record as the rest of them because I only have the one server. Also because currently the app does not support multi location usability (maybe someday for a true CDN). Also I've had to add another website on the server with a host header of the new image URL.

So I've started moving image URL's to this new URL and I can already see a difference. I started with just the main page and the 4 different images I use for the different blog types. This should allow your browser to download images, and content at the same time using the two different URLs.

I'm also experimenting with caching the images, but need to do some testing to see if this is going to work out correctly.

Once other quick speed boot I added was that all the site settigns are going to be sourced from cache on the server rather than having to do a database trip for each one. While this is a nominal gain for my server, in a large setting with busier servers it would be an issue. Plus, if you can cache it, why not.

I'll be moving the gallery images over next but need to do some testing before I put all my eggs in one basket so to speak.