The C Board *should* be faster now

[webmaster]

As of yesterday evening, I've turned on the use of a content delivery network (CDN) for the C Board. This should make it faster for both US visitors (the main server is based on the US) and perhaps more noticeably for non-US traffic, by serving static content from geographically closer locations (such as using a data center in Amersterdam for traffic from Europe).

This ought to be a seamless transition, other than a slightly improved browsing experience, but if you do see any problems or issues, please let me know!

[Mario F.]

This is excellent news. And also for you I believe, since takes some of the load of your primary server.

Did a quick check and nothing changed around here (Portugal). But that's probably expected. We connect through one of two exchange points at UK or France (if nothing has in the meantime changed for the past couple of years). The UK exchange gives us a rather good pipe to the US, so that's almost certainly the primary option. Doing a tracert I can see a rather fast and short route from my home to your server.

Should come very handy though when that server is overloaded, some router in the way is having problems, or our UK exchange is down. Not sure however if this isn't too early to be checking for its functionality. Maybe it needs a few days to settle in.

[SlyMaelstrom]

I honestly don't know much about CDNs, but I didn't think they would be used for anything like a web forum. I always thought they were more of a high bandwidth kind of thing like streaming video.

Anyway, good to hear. Though I'm pretty local, so it was nearly immeasurably fast for me, anyway.

[webmaster]

The forum uses a pretty good amount of CSS and JavaScript, as well as a number of images (including avatars) that can be cached--so it's true that it won't be quite as nice as caching everything, but it ought to still be useful. To Mario F's point about reducing server load, the CDN served 520MB on Saturday from the message board alone.

I suspect that you might not see as much improvement as you would if you visited from a new computer, since there may also be some browser-side caching as well.

Regarding settling-in time: the CDN is set up as a "pull" zone that essentially caches any files accessed through it. All CSS, images and JS go through it (if you view source, you'll see references to im.cprogramming.com, js.cprogramming.com, and av.cprogramming.com for images, css/js and avatars), so there is a certain small amount of time it takes to populate the cache. A small number of files dominate the majority of requests, so this doesn't really take too long. (I'm seeing 98%+ cache hits.)

[whiteflags]

I noticed a difference for the better. I'm pretty sure I'm not imagining it since I cleaned out my cache this morning and the page is as quick as my browser's cache. Unusual since there's always a bit of rendering time I could attribute to downloading stuff or something else.

[Mario F.]

the CDN served 520MB on Saturday from the message board alone.

Uff!
No wonder... I bet financially, the CDN beats the hell of any contract you could get with your host. No need to answer that.

I always assumed the cboard was a financial burden. But not this much. I'm going to start clicking ads more often...

(I'm seeing 98%+ cache hits.)

That pretty much settles it then.

This is the endpoint of cboard.cprogramming.com for me now:

Peer 1 Network Inc. PEER1-BLK-10 (NET-76-74-128-0-1) 76.74.128.0 - 76.74.255.255
ServerBeach PEER1-SERVERBEACH-08A (NET-76-74-248-0-1) 76.74.248.0 - 76.74.255.255

I don't know how to read arin.net records so I won't even bother, but in any case seems to be working just fine. The actual address is US for me. So I'm assuming I do go to that server and don't use any in Europe, which is just fine considering how we are connected over here.

[grumpy]

Now .... if we could only tweak our brains and fingers on the keyboard to run faster