billrini
05-16-2012, 07:19 PM
I've been looking around and I've found a bunch of hacks and some discussions going back to 2009 but is there any more recent news on when/if vBulletin will ever be CDN friendly?
Some folks have suggested just moving static content off to a dedicated, low footprint webserver to improve server performance but this is really just a poor man's CDN. What we really need is something that can serve content based on geo location of the user. If someone hits my forum in Asia they should get the static content served from a server sitting in Asia. If they hit the server from Europe they should get static content from a server in Europe.
Like I said, this has been something I've seen discussed going back to 2009 so one would think there's been some progress. Not just hacks or whatnot but something actually built into vBulletin that allows you to store and serve static content from the cloud.
And on a related topic, what about doing away with the attachment manager for serving up attachments? That's another big issue in moving to a CDN. I understand that some people need to protect their files but one (of several) reasons that people do this is they don't want their servers slammed with people downloading or hotlinking to attachments. But, a CDN dramatically reduces the impact of this (other than bandwidth costs) so why not have an option where the URL for the images that my users upload can be www.domain.com/attachments/123/456/myimage.jpg instead of going through a PHP file (which simply introduces unnecessary overhead if you aren't setting permissions on your attachments)?
Not to mention that the attachment manager is really rather crude, and not really user-friendly by today's standards.
Some folks have suggested just moving static content off to a dedicated, low footprint webserver to improve server performance but this is really just a poor man's CDN. What we really need is something that can serve content based on geo location of the user. If someone hits my forum in Asia they should get the static content served from a server sitting in Asia. If they hit the server from Europe they should get static content from a server in Europe.
Like I said, this has been something I've seen discussed going back to 2009 so one would think there's been some progress. Not just hacks or whatnot but something actually built into vBulletin that allows you to store and serve static content from the cloud.
And on a related topic, what about doing away with the attachment manager for serving up attachments? That's another big issue in moving to a CDN. I understand that some people need to protect their files but one (of several) reasons that people do this is they don't want their servers slammed with people downloading or hotlinking to attachments. But, a CDN dramatically reduces the impact of this (other than bandwidth costs) so why not have an option where the URL for the images that my users upload can be www.domain.com/attachments/123/456/myimage.jpg instead of going through a PHP file (which simply introduces unnecessary overhead if you aren't setting permissions on your attachments)?
Not to mention that the attachment manager is really rather crude, and not really user-friendly by today's standards.