Skip to main content

Should I use CDN or not?

I was doing some comparison of home page loading of my company's website and one competitor's homepage loading. The competitor website loads in a snap and ours take some secs before it shows up. Here are some of the stats from YSlow for mine and competitor's site.










Now as I can see that competitor is making more images/JS then my company's site but it loads in a snap. I can notice three differences
  1. They are using a CDN so images are being downloaded from a local server near Dallas
  2. Their total download size for Java scripts and image are 1/3 then ours.
  3. ours is HTTPS and their site is HTTP. We can't change to HTTP as we cater to SMB and security transmission is a key for us.
I am working with the team to reduce the size of Javascript download and cut it by half. Earlier we were using YUI for tree and ExtJS for table. We recently moved to ExtJS tree as it performs much better then YUI in IE and when you have large no of  children nodes. There are few remaining pieces of code that still rely on YUI so removing them will cut the size of JS download by half. The size of images are also double the size of competitor mainly because our website has went through so many revisions that the sprites are becoming Fatty and we are not removing unused images out of those, plus some stupid decisions by developers to create a new sprite with common images has also caused issues. I had already tried smushing images and got the maximum juice out of them I guess I will have to go through a big cleanup.

But in the interim I am in dilemma to use CDN or not? Even locally within the intranet the home page load is sluggish so it has to be the size of download. Will try to reduce the size of download and see the timings?  If I can match the competitor's Kilobytes downloaded then I can think of using the CDN or not.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

RabbitMQ java clients for beginners

Here is a sample of a consumer and producer example for RabbitMQ. The steps are Download Erlang Download Rabbit MQ Server Download Rabbit MQ Java client jars Compile and run the below two class and you are done. This sample create a Durable Exchange, Queue and a Message. You will have to start the consumer first before you start the for the first time. For more information on AMQP, Exchanges, Queues, read this excellent tutorial http://blogs.digitar.com/jjww/2009/01/rabbits-and-warrens/ +++++++++++++++++RabbitMQProducer.java+++++++++++++++++++++++++++ import com.rabbitmq.client.Connection; import com.rabbitmq.client.Channel; import com.rabbitmq.client.*; public class RabbitMQProducer { public static void main(String []args) throws Exception { ConnectionFactory factory = new ConnectionFactory(); factory.setUsername("guest"); factory.setPassword("guest"); factory.setVirtualHost("/"); factory.setHost("127.0.0.1"); factory.se...
23 comments
Read more

Spring 3.2 quartz 2.1 Jobs added with no trigger must be durable.

I am trying to enable HA on nodes and in that process I found that in a two test node setup a job that has a frequency of 10 sec was running into deadlock. So I tried upgrading from Quartz 1.8 to 2.1 by following the migration guide but I ran into an exception that says "Jobs added with no trigger must be durable.". After looking into spring and Quartz code I figured out that now Quartz is more strict and earlier the scheduler.addJob had a replace parameter which if passed to true would skip the durable check, in latest quartz this is fixed but spring hasnt caught up to this. So what do you do, well I jsut inherited the factory and set durability to true and use that public class DurableJobDetailFactoryBean extends JobDetailFactoryBean {     public DurableJobDetailFactoryBean() {         setDurability(true);     } } and used this instead of JobDetailFactoryBean in the spring bean definition     <bean i...
7 comments
Read more

Jersey streaming binary data

In the previous post I showed how you can post binary data to a jersey REST api. You can also use Jersey to serve files, although its better done by apache or nginx but sometimes you might want to serve thumbnails stored in a database out of a service and put varnish in front of the REST api to cache the thumbnails. This is just a demonstration of using jersey to serve binary data in streaming fashion. @Path("/download-service") public class DownaloadService extends SecureRestService { private static final AppLogger logger = AppLogger.getLogger(DownaloadService.class); @POST @Produces(MediaType.APPLICATION_OCTET_STREAM) public StreamingOutput getThumbnail( @FormParam("securityKey") final String securityKey, @FormParam("guid") final String guid) throws JSONException { return new StreamingOutput() { @Override public void write(OutputStream out) throws IOException { try { if (!isAuthorized(securityKey)) { response.sendErro...
12 comments
Read more