Legacy Push Attachments,CSS,Avatars to CDN

[pmraiders]

I was going through my vbOptimise plugin looking for ways to make my site faster, and I noticed that I am failing 3 optimal settings checks. The problem is I cannot store attachments, avatars and css stylesheets as files since my forum is hosted on a HA recyclable infrastructure with load balanced apache servers that get file system updates via subversion.

It doesn't seem like much of a stretch to take the css stylesheets, attachments and avatars out of the database and push them to the CDN integration of choice either on a cron (if they dont exist in the cloud load them locally) or push them dynamically as they are uploaded (store in database and on cloud just to be safe)

Let me know if this is a viable option. With your existing infrastructure I can't see it being too bad though.

 

[Fillip H.]

CSS can only be pushed to a CDN if they are stored in the filesystem, as CDNs can only request new copies of the files if they have a local file to compare to.

i.e. if fileA.txt has a last modified time of 00:00:05 on the server and 00:00:03 on the CDN, the CDN requests a new copy of the file so as to not serve the user stale content.

At the moment I can't see a solution for that if there is no fileA.txt on the server.

 

[pmraiders]

CSS can only be pushed to a CDN if they are stored in the filesystem, as CDNs can only request new copies of the files if they have a local file to compare to.

i.e. if fileA.txt has a last modified time of 00:00:05 on the server and 00:00:03 on the CDN, the CDN requests a new copy of the file so as to not serve the user stale content.

At the moment I can't see a solution for that if there is no fileA.txt on the server.

I am using your CDN Integration with Amazon S3. It seems like your system requires you to sync with the cdn, which means you could push the css files to s3 during the sync. You would obviously rewrite all the css.php calls to reference the cdn.

The file in the database is still a file, its just not on the webserver disk. You could drop it to disk temporarily if thats what it takes for your api to push to the server.

 

[Fillip H.]

Unfortunately that isn't going to work for all types of CDNs.

The "Origin Pull" CDN type relies on the method of checking for modified files I described in the post you quoted. For that reason, it's not possible to simply rewrite css.php calls, as it relies on physical files existing.

We cannot implement functionality that does not work for all CDN types, as that would lead to confusion.