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On 08/01/13 00:41, Kai Hendry wrote: > > Compare that with Google... I'm guessing your bitfolk server is the other side of the world to the dcglug server. I'm not sure why I should compare it. Google have a lot of money and a lot of customers all over the world. I mean if money is no object we could bung DCGLUG mirrors around the world, or use a CDN, but I don't think many people would notice. The primary speed factors may not be how far the site is away, or how slow the server, anyhow. I did a local test of various sites, and the only request taking more than a second for the home page fetch was the one requiring a full DNS lookup to resolve the domain name, even though the site is on the server that I did the test from, and repeated tests were around the 0.1s to 0.3s mark. Most "really" slow sites I see now are just a mix of too many servers, requiring DNS, and generally involving multiple servers which insist on non-caching content for tracking users (facebook, analytics, advertiser code). The dynamic v static is a red herring. Sure static sites load quickly, but the content is always the same. You can put a reverse proxy like Varnish in front of dynamic sites (or even just use Apache mod_proxy) and restore the performance of static sites if you don't mind that the site looks the same to everyone, but really that would be terribly dull. I note with some amusement that the dclug.org.uk site would be loading quicker than the google home page is it wasn't for twitter and facebook components on the front page. In fairness Google are loading content from their own equivalent (google+) but given the different in technology investment, and benefits of scale, I thought it was quite amusing to note the similar load times. Although they are setting up HTTPS tunnels which is a known cost (probably worth paying most of the time). Note the slowest fetched front page I tested was my own blog which use Wordpress, which also doesn't have well optimized caching because well few people read it and fewer read it twice. This was also the fastest loading site (aside from a purely static site with no third party content or javascript) because it only messes with Google for fonts, and an html5 javascript shim, no content from facebook or twitter (but it does have links to both!). So whilst the front page fetch was slowest, all the other components were loaded very quickly indeed despite a general lack of optimization. As I said "ab" is good for testing how fast you can serve a file, but may not tell you much about how long it takes a web page to load. One of the other better performing sites was also Wordpress, but that is on a (virtual) server with a bit more oomph and a tuned mysql database, and whilst slightly slower than a static site on the same server, the different is considerably less than the time it takes you to blink and really not worth worrying about for 99.9% of sites. -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq