More on CDNs

2010 July 7 at 11:51 » Tagged as :cloud, millenium,

CDNs exists because it's widely believed that they help speed up website load times by distributing static content to locations that are geographically closer to the user. However this might actually slow things down for some users. Typically you can use tools such as Firebug, Chrome Developer Tools and Yslow to check your page load time and efficiency. But once again you are testing from your own location. Fortunately there are a few tools that will help you figure out the page load times from remote locations. They include Pingdom Tools, Show Slow and WebPageTest. WebPageTest even allows you to specify different locations for the test server. However the best looking tool appears to be Boomerang. But it's still early days for Boomerang so let's look at a few results from Pingdom Tools.

Pingdom test while cloud front is enabled.
Pingdom test while cloud front is enabled.

Static content hosted on S3
Static content hosted on S3

All content on the webserver itself
Without and content distribution

All the images can be clicked on to be zoomed. As you can see, content distribution really does have a positive impact when the site's visitors are from the United States.