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Drupal CDN integration: easier, more flexible and faster!
Wim Leers
Wim Leers Dec 10, 2008
Abstract: 

90% of the page loading time is spent on retrieving CSS, JavaScript and images. There are lots of techniques to reduce this, but using a CDN is the most effective. Currently it's expensive to integrate with a CDN (especially if you want to avoid vendor lock-in) and it's hard to serve file A from a CDN, file B from a static file server and file C from neither. In this session, you'll learn about the push-to-CDN model, which makes all of this trivial.

Presenters: 

Wim Leers

Session Overview

This session will explain how a CDN (Content Delivery Network) improves page loading times and how you should analyze the page loading performance while evaluating a CDN. Existing techniques for integrating a CDN with Drupal will be compared and an alternative, comprehensive solution will be presented.

Agenda

  • How pages are loaded by the browser
  • How a CDN improves page loading times
  • Evaluating the results
  • Existing Drupal CDN integration techniques
  • Push-to-CDN model: pros & cons
  • CDN integration module: synchronization via Drupal or highly scalable daemon
  • Alternative uses: create your own CDN, massive back-up tool

Goals

You should have a good overview of the different techniques to integrate Drupal with a CDN.
You should have learned how you can evaluate page loading performance to know which files should be served from a CDN.

Resources

You should be familiar with how a web page is structured. Already knowing the concept of a Content Delivery Network is not required, but will make it easier to understand.

Note

  • This should be scheduled just after Konstantin Käfer's session about front-end performance. It's strongly related and people attending his session are likely to attend this one as well.
  • This session will only be possible if I get a scholarship. Update: I got a scholarship, yay! Now this session only needs enough votes :P