Faster Geekzone, changes behind the scenes

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freitasm

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Topic # 68055 14-Sep-2010 10:46

Hello folks.

Last weekend we started using a CDN (Content Delivery Network) to serve our static content (mainly CSS and images).

The CDN provider we are using (www.maxcdn.com) has servers around the U.S. and Europe. We are seeing a balance between content being served from Los Angeles (mainly New Zealand and U.S. visitors) and Amsterdam (European visitors).

We still serve our pages from our local server, and use the CDN for its best distribution, and reduced traffic on our server.

Even though we moved this, you should actually notice a small improvement in speed. We are now using a cookieless domain for assets (CSS and images), have less network traffic in our main server, and tweaked the Aptimize configuration even more.

In the future we will be working on serving New Zealand visitors from our local server hosted at Datacom.

If you find any problems with the new configuration please let us know here.

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Ragnor

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Reply # 379713 14-Sep-2010 15:35

Looking good.

Next step rewrite the forums in ASP.NET MVC 2 imo :)

freitasm

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Reply # 379715 14-Sep-2010 15:38

Although part of the plan, we haven't reached the limits of Classic ASP ;)

The few changes in the last six months allowed us to scale the site, speeding up delivery, making it faster while using the same platform.

I was once told that some similar sized domains were using a lot more resources (CPU, memory) than we do, delivering similar amount of pages/monthly.

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MG1976

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Reply # 381070 17-Sep-2010 09:26

I have a small problem that may be related to this upgrade (this wasn't happening before). I use an extension to Chrome called Reader Plus, which adds a few enhancements to Google Reader, for example, lets you click on a feed entry to display the destination of that entry (i.e. the entire website) in an iframe within Reader. I use this a lot with Geekzone as it means you are not taken away from Reader all the time to view blog posts and forum feeds.

Anyway, recently this has stopped working with Geekzone feeds. When I click a feed entry Geekzone starts to load in the iframe, then reloads the screen and replaces Reader with the geekzone site. I raised an issue and the response was "Some sites don't accept to be opened in an iframe. So they re-oepn them self in the main window."

Would this be related to the update, or is it something else?

Cheers
Greg

freitasm

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Reply # 381076 17-Sep-2010 09:40

MG1976: I raised an issue and the response was "Some sites don't accept to be opened in an iframe. So they re-oepn them self in the main window."

Not related to the update, but something we have done. We have added a code to break out of iframe/frames because we identified situations where the site was being framed by third parties.

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MG1976

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Reply # 381088 17-Sep-2010 09:54

That's a real shame. I guess the end result is I won't be visiting Geekzone as often, as I can't easily duck in and out of threads that interest me from within reader (unless I can find a better way).