Speeding up image heavy sites

Hi all,

I am getting a new skin made up for my forum that is heavy on images. This always seemed to cause a problem on my last forum since it loaded a lot slower. However i was under the impression that once the images are loaded then they are cached and would load quicker the second time round, unless they did a hard refresh or cleared out their temp internet files. Am i wrong?

So, to try and speed up the loading of an image intensive forum i wondered if you had any tips. For example, if i host my images on one URL and leave the content (text, scripts) for the url on which it is being viewed, would that speed things up? The way i see it is, one server would be loading the images whereas the other would be loading the rest, instead of one doing both.

Any help / advice would be appreciated,

James

[TheProphet]

Maybe you can load the images from another domain/host.

Explain:

The advantage for using a separate domain for images is because there a no cookies send with the images.
So that saves a little bandwith, and the images are quicker to its destination.
Browsers use standard 2 connections per domain.

So it would deffo speed up m8

[ChrisLM2001]

Originally Posted by aceofspades

So, to try and speed up the loading of an image intensive forum i wondered if you had any tips.

Depends on two things...

1. How much money you have.

or...

2. How dedicated you are of serving the most to save money.

Conventional treatment is to have another server to serve the images (usually on a very cheap server -- heck, a P3 box would do for it -- with cheap Cogent bandwidth). That reduces the server load on your forum proper server.

But, you'll have to cough up the extra $$/$$$ a month for it.

The unconventional treatment is to rip Apache out and replace it with Lighttpd, or better, Ngnix. The alternative browsers can serve many more connections with 1/4 to 1/3 less memory requirements than Apache (which is a literal pig). They're becoming more popular for those running VPS accounts, since memory is in short supply. On a dedicated, you can reclaim extra memory for serving more images/or using it to power your database with the surplus.

BUT, alternative web browsers takes a lot of tweaking at first to work right. If you're not familiar how to do it, you'll need to hire someone who specializes in the configuring them. Ngnix powers some of the largest traffic sites in Russia, so it can handle whatever you can dish out on it for a forum. It's just not as known.

So, it basically comes down to those two options. Personally, I'd take the second option, if for anything to get more connections, save memory and not going the mega-cluster route.

Oh, the nice feature of Ngnix -- very search engine friendly URLs (and no file extensions).