CODEWITHSUNDEEP
browserclient-servercdnhttpconnection
sam
sam

Reputation: 10094

By hosting some assets on a server and others on a CDN will this allow a browser to negotiate more connections?

Short question Im trying to speed up a static website - html,css,js the site also has many images that weight allot, during testing it seems the browser is struggling managing all these connections.

Apart from the normal compression im wandering if by hosting my site files - html,css,js on the VPS and then taking all the images onto a CDN would this allow the browser to negociate with 2 server and be quicker over all. (Obviously there is going to be no mbps speed gain as that limited by the users connection, but im wandering if this would allow me to have more open connections, thus having a quicker TTFB)

Long question with background

Ive got a site that im working on speeding up, the site itself is all client side html,js, css. The issue with the speed on this site tends to be a) the size of the files b) the qty of the files. ie. there are lots of images, and they each weight allot.

Im going to do all the usual stuff combine the ones that are used for the UI into a sprite sheet and compress all image using jpegmini etc.

Ive moved the site to a VPS which has made a big difference, the next move im pondering is setting up a CDN to host the images, im not trying to host them for any geographical distribution or load balancing reason (although that is an added benefit) but i was wandering if the bottle neck on downloading assets would be less if the users browser would be getting all the site files : html, js, css from the VPS but at the same time getting the images from the CDN, is this were the bottle neck is ie. the users browser can only have so many connections to 1 server at a time, but if i had 2 servers it could negotiate the same amount of connections but on both servers concurrently ?

Im guessing there could also be an issue with load on the server, but for testing im using a 2gb multi core VPS which no one else is on so in that regard that shouldnt be a problem that comes up during my tests.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 137

Answers (1)

raviolicode
raviolicode

Reputation: 2175

Context

Traditionally, web browsers place a limit on the number of simultaneous connections a browser can make to one domain. These limits were established in 1999 in the HTTP/1.1 specification by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). The intent of the limit was to avoid overloading web servers and to reduce internet congestion. The commonly used limit is no more than two simultaneous connections with any server or proxy.

Solution to that limitation: Domain Sharding

Domain sharding is a technique to accelerate page load times by tricking browsers into opening more simultaneous connections than are normally allowed.

See this article) for an example by using multiple subdomains in order to multiply parallel connections to the CDN.

So instead of:

  • http://cdn.domain.com/img/brown_sheep.jpg
  • http://cdn.domain.com/img/green_sheep.jpg

The browser can use parallel connections by using a subdomain:

  • http://cdn.domain.com/img/brown_sheep.jpg
  • http://cdn1.domain.com/img/green_sheep.jpg

Present: beware of Sharding

You might consider the downsides of using domain sharding, because it won't be necessary and even hurts performance under SPDY. If the browsers you're targeting are mostly SPDY is supported by Chrome, Firefox, Opera, and IE 11, you might want to skip domain sharding.

Upvotes: 1

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