Question

Gzipped static content on Amazon Cloudfront

Asked by: rstaveley

To provide a good experience on your international site, you want to follow the advice at http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html (allowing yourself to be nagged to do so by the YSlow add-in in Firefox) and:

1. To put your static content onto edge servers on a content delivery network (CDN)
2. To do the right thing with expires and caching headers
3. Use gzip compression

To a cheapskate like me CDN means Amazon Cloudfront via Amazon S3. It is highly optimised but not very flexible. You can't expect the server to be selective about gzip compression. You have to upload pre-compressed content into your S3 bucket (hence to Cloudfront) and give it the hard-coded gzip encoding header - i.e. http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec14.html#sec14.11

I don't really want to go back to a "site best viewed by..." world, but I wonder if I should ignore clients who are unable to handle gzip-compressed content and deliver content universally in compressed form?

I understand that the Zone Alarm personal firewall doesn't handle gzip compression, but presumably if you deliver compressed content it passes through regardless? [Untested.] So what sort of visitor will I be upsetting by failing to handle those who can't accept gzip encoding?

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Asked On
2009-10-09 at 08:50:58ID24799648
Tags

gzip

,

s3

,

cloudfront

Topic

Miscellaneous Web Development

Participating Experts
1
Points
500
Comments
4

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Answers

 

by: shalomcPosted on 2009-10-10 at 11:14:06ID: 25543168

You can use a CDN that supports gzip and is relatively cheap, too.
Try simplecdn.com

ShalomC

 

by: rstaveleyPosted on 2009-10-10 at 13:34:04ID: 25543696

Thanks for picking this up, ShalomC.

There's a lot of out of date pricing comparison out there isn't there?

I had read SimpleCDN was charging $5.00/GB month for storage in a comment at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=369366 but see now that the price is actually $0.75/GB month according to http://www.simplecdn.com/pricing. That still compares badly with with Cloudfront's S3 storage charge which is $0.15-0.18/GB month, but it is not outrageous.

Assuming the my application is successful (dream on!), transfer is probably more significant. SimpleCDN starts at $0.039 / GB and Cloudfront at $0.17-0.221 / GB.

That makes SimpleCDN look very attractive to the accountants. However, the CDN latency testing with just-ping at http://blog.mudy.info/tag/cdn/ makes it look pretty second rate. I wonder if that would be bad enough to lose the gzip advantage??

 

by: shalomcPosted on 2009-10-10 at 15:16:33ID: 25544076

You really have to see where the have POP and where they don't, and correlate it with your web site visitors.

The sweet thing about the new business models of CDN is that you can spend a couple of hundred $$ or even less to test both solutions.
Compared to the draconian contracts Akamai used to hand out this is a bargain :)

If you really can spend some money on it, then I suggest that you test the CDN performance with a testing service like www.dotcom-monitor.com
They have monitors all over the globe, and detailed stats about everything.

So ideally, you sample 4 weeks of testing: 2 weeks for CloudFront and 2 weeks for simplecdn, and you don't have to involve the production site because you care only for the CDN performance. Total cost will not exceed $200.

ShalomC

 

by: rstaveleyPosted on 2009-10-11 at 13:19:11ID: 25547190

You're right to highlight the fact that you can test and deploy CDNs solutions nowadays for a feasible amount of money.  Akamai was so way beyond the reach of the sort of businesses that I deal with that CDNs were frankly out of sight and mind. Now that alternative CDNs are affordable, they are another thing to worry about... in a good way.

20120131-EE-VQP-002

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