One of my friends uses a 'CDN' called http://www.cachefly.com/ for his site. They have a free trial on so I thought i would test it out.
Basically, I load images to my account there and the files are apread out on servers around the world. Then when someone requests that file, it is downloaded from the server closest to them, rather than the CKA sever. So for people in Vancouver, they wouldn't notice a difference, but someone in florida... might notice an increase in website speed.
Since I have to change any image link to use this, I will only be caching high traffic static content images, like images in the layout of the site. I have started by adding most the images on the CKA homepage.
Does anyone notice it being any faster loading? Specificly people far away from Vancouver.
If it seems it help page load time, I will try implementing it through the forums, and maybe come up with a way to sync avatars and sig images as well.
Well I compared this page to the home page, and the home page opened twice as fast. And considering there is more on the homepage, I figure that means it works
Not sure if this counts but I'm down in texas at work ATM and the pages are opening up quicker then they used to from here in months past.
There i have cached all the images on the homepage that I can.
The following are NOT cached
'topnews' images
'picture comment' thumbnails
weather map
video thumbnails
'Member Photos' thumbnails
Since all of those are dynamic content, I can't really cache them in this way.
Even I notice the homepage loading faster, so i think this works! After some more testing I may start implimenting this to the forums.
Is that why the site was down a few times this afternoon? I got a memory error a few times.
This thread typically "generates" in 1.1 seconds for me, while the front page loads in 0.3 seconds - not sure if that's what you're talking about.
no the site being down is not related. PHP has been doing a bunch of weird memory errors lately. I've been trying to track it down.
I added a bunch of the images in the forums to cachfly.
Avatars, signature images and attachment images are not added.
But having the other images on cachefly will hopefully make the forum pages load a bit quicker. At the very least it will take some file-hits load off the main server.
do the forums seem any faster to anyone?
have you gotten this in the last week at all?
The last week as in the last 7 days? yes. But not since a day or 3, 4...
but its been much less frequent than a week+ ago?
much less frequent