Joomla and CDN(s)

[Shimei]

Hello,

I have some questions and could use some experienced input on the matter of CDNs. I had a load time of 10 seconds while using Cloudflare's free service. Last night I decided to try Amazon Cloudfront. There was only a one second performance increase between the two. But when I enabled Cloudflare while also using Cloudfront I received around a 4 second increase in performance. Coupled with Siteground's Joomla Booster Package, where images are served dynamically from a cache server... something great happened - my load times went down into the two second range. Is this a normal practice? regarding running multiple CDNs? Should I try to optimize using only one, or just ride out the overall performance increase I am seeing now in Gtmetrix.com with multiple CDNs?

Here's a link to the Amazon setup I had done last night: http://www.reformedchristianity.org/for ... mance.html

I hadn't finished it yet, because as I mentioned before, I ended up enabling Cloudflare to compliment Cloudfront.

[pinkshirt]

I think it would make it harder to maintain the site in the long run when using multiple CDN's. You're better off working out what is giving you the best performance and then optimising that.

While you are looking at optimising your site, here's another suggestion. A lot of the images you are using have quite a large file size and can be further compressed (without losing too much quality.) For instance header_destroyed.png and page_cracks.png are 283kb and 565kb. If you process them through tinypng.com they reduce to 100kb and 202kb. Do this for all your png files and it will help.

[Shimei]

I think it would make it harder to maintain the site in the long run when using multiple CDN's. You're better off working out what is giving you the best performance and then optimising that.

While you are looking at optimising your site, here's another suggestion. A lot of the images you are using have quite a large file size and can be further compressed (without losing too much quality.) For instance header_destroyed.png and page_cracks.png are 283kb and 565kb. If you process them through tinypng.com they reduce to 100kb and 202kb. Do this for all your png files and it will help.

Thank you! The score on page speed has gone from a B to an A just with tinypng!

[roadwarrior]

I might try that set up. I have cloudflare pro and I'm still getting 4-7 sec. Lowest 3.

[Martin1971]

Have you found a way to leverage browser catching using Joomla? What score are you getting from Googles page speed test?

[Shimei]

Hi Martin,

Sorry for the delay. My results can be viewed here: http://gtmetrix.com/reports/www.reforme ... g/ZODcIGTh

or try the page yourself at http://www.reformedchristianity.org

I am using and having great results with Jch Optimizer from the joomla extension directory which helped tremendously, especially in the number of requests. With Amazon Cloudfront I have a double A rating as you can see. I ditched Cloudflare altogether.

[zagorskey]

Maxcdn and Edgecast have been concidered one of the best cdn providers worldwide, both of them giving faster respond results than Amazon. Which is your website's location?

[pacowilson]

Actually, I am very satisfied the cloudflare CDN free service. If your site takes 10 seconds for loading, you need to check your website response time. CDN only cache your images and CSS, but it doesn't cache your dynamic content. Using the pingdom tool to analysis each of element loading time. To minimize the server response time, you need to optimize your joomla website through deleting unnecessary components, plugins. Finally, you can go to "Global configuration" then enable debug, you will see the executing time for database queries.

Hit in nutshell, you can use the Jotcache, JCH optimize to optimize your joomla website. Secondly, go to your server to check the usage of CPU and RAM. If the RAM cpu usage up to 100%, that means there is something wrong with your server hardware or PHP version.

[robertruiz]

you are right the cloudflare CDN free service is very usefull. actually i also use it.

[Dcolorado]

For what its worth, we have utilized Cloudflare in the past and also had pretty good results.

[damoncloudflare]

" but it doesn't cache your dynamic content."

Just a quick note that CloudFlare doesn't cache dynamic content by default, as you said, but you can actually extend our caching through PageRules.