Comments on: Drupal Page Rendering (part 12)

By: Murray Woodman

Murray Woodman — Thu, 03 Mar 2011 03:51:32 +0000

If you are going with a CDN then I recommend going the simple route with the CDN module and just use Origin Pull mode. You then can avoid installing File Conveyor and configuring it to get it working. I personally had a few issues getting FileConveyor going and would say that you have to have pretty decent nix skills to sort it all out. If you go with Origin Pull, it is then a relatively simple matter of setting up the CDN, configuring CNAMEs if you so wish and then making use of the CDN Module. All up a relatively painless procedure.
Perhaps the most difficult thing to sort out is who your CDN provide is going to be. There are a couple of CDN speed test websites out there to show you how they perform. My testing showed that Edgecast performed very well. It also has an edge in Sydney, Australia and other locations in Asia. This made a big difference to me as my server is in the states but my audience is in Australia. If you don’t mind average performance to Australia and Asia then MaxCDN is unbeatable for price. You can get introductory plans there which are cheaper than Edgecast wholesale. So you can’t go wrong if most of your traffic is in US and Europe.
Wim will be glad to know that I finally fixed up the speed problems this blog was having. I was on shared hosting and that were throttling my MaxClients to such a degree that the page was stalling. I’ve since moved to a VPS and have made a number of improvements to my Workpress and Drupal sites so that they are now all scoring between 88 and 98 in YSlow. Its taken me a while but I finally got there

By: Kevin

Kevin — Tue, 07 Dec 2010 22:45:53 +0000

Our customers using Wim's Drupal CDN module have seen very good success, and if you're not currently using a CDN I strongly encourage you to check it out. It's a quick and easy way (with Wim's module) to boost performance. Our first TB is also very affordable with MaxCDN's Drupal CDN Arithok, we have step-by-step instructions on our wiki on how to set everything up. Feel free to contact me directly if you have any questions.

By: arithok

arithok — Sun, 11 Apr 2010 08:21:41 +0000

Hi, thx for the article. My drupal site get a good poin from yslow grade, but still confuse with CDN.

By: Murray Woodman

Murray Woodman — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 00:45:57 +0000

Great to hear from you Wim. I see that you have made a few recent bug fixes and improvements to the CDN Integration Module as well. I’ll update the page with your comments later today.

Regarding the slowness of the site, I see that some static files are hanging for 15s. I’ll have to track that one down…

By: Wim Leers

Wim Leers — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 13:44:06 +0000

Note that the SimpleCDN module is not recommended, since it cannot serve *all* CSS/JS/images/… from a CDN, only files from modules that explicitly support it. Hence it's pretty useless. See this comment for more details. Also, for automating image optimization, you can use my File Conveyor daemon, which can easily be integrated with Drupal by using the CDN integration module in advanced mode. P.S.: ironically, this site is extremely slow at the time of writing … :)