Hi i am currently doing some IT consulting work for a medium sized firm and one of the core issues that we are currently trying address is to improve overall performance of their website by reducing request-response latency and one solution we are seriously considering is to replicate/cache static contents on a CDN. Is there anyone out there with first hand experience of working with CDNs? Your opinions will be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.

Yes, I used it for an app, and it reduced the request response time. most cloud services offers it

You may just need to make sure that your static content is properly cached, and that you're serving it with an efficient web server like nginx.

I've worked with a CDN called Cloudflare.

Seun: You may just need to make sure that your static content is properly cached, and that you're serving it with an efficient web server like nginx.

I've worked with a CDN called Cloudflare.

Same cloudflare that got blamed?

CodeHouse: Same cloudflare that got blamed?

They had nothing to do with the attack.

Seun:
They had nothing to do with the attack.

After reading KOO's statement, well what can one believe..Seun pls note you have to really take security seriously, to tell you the truth, I see lots of youths getting motivated as to start the "site attack" contest.

I personally can take down some few ones too not with known methods anyway..I want to start the attack on KOO! Lol

OP, just like i love to rant at every opportunity, it all boils down to factors surrounding your project. cash available, experience of IT persons, delivery timeframe and in this case, current latency versus final latency after cdn implementation


if it is a database intensive application, cdn MAY not improve anything since the problem MAY be from the database taking too long to return result. you should consider testing this before making your client pay for nothing. you can easily test this with time functions i.e before and after query

your internet connection, test to be sure this isnt the actual culprit

check your server ram usage and processor, if you are running low on ram/processor, this can cause delays too

if all clear, then try an account with rackspacecloud.com or hpcloud.com, upload a file to their storage, enable cdn and test

rackspace uses akamai fast cdn and it is what they say it is, very fast.

using cloud servers is not cheap as people think, it only ensures you dont pay 59$ monthly to test your apps, once you are ready to go live and you expect to use up to 8gb ram, pls pls pls, stick with a dedicated server as it is cheaper and push your heavy resources only to storages/cdn