Tindeck Blog Up to speed with Amazon S3

Hello!Many of you who host your own sites will know about Yahoo YSlow and Google Pagespeed; two fantastic tools that measure and identify the bottlenecks that are degrading your users' experience, ranging from the obvious things like uncompressed images, to more esoteric things like entity tagging.Tindeck's been growing in leaps and bounds: more users than ever are sharing more files in more ways and with more people than we anticipated, and it's all been getting a little too much for the single web server we use to deliver the site. To alleviate some of that pressure, we've implemented a bunch of changes (inspired by YSlow and Pagespeed) to bring us in line with web performance best practices.We've run all the static images on Tindeck through Yahoo's lossless image compression tool smush.it, a free tool cthat ompresses images as much as possible without losing any display information. In some cases, images have been compressed by as much as 80%, although the average across all images was closer to 15%. It may not sound like much, but a 15% saving on static images will save hundreds of gigabytes of data transfers every month, especially when combined with proper client-side caching.When a browser like Firefox or Chrome retrieves an object from a website, the server presenting it can opt to include some advice in the form of a header called Cache-Control about whether or not the browser should save a local copy of the file for future reference. When we serve up a file we know won't be changing any time soon, we can instruct the browser to save a local copy for as long as we like and until the browser has its cache cleared or the cached file expires, the browser will load its cached copy instead of asking for the file from the server again. All static images (and some static CSS / Javascript) on Tindeck have been modified to expire after 10 days instead of never expiring, which should have an immediate effect on the amount of requests the server has to process each second.The biggest change to Tindeck by far has been to offload the hosting of all these static objects to an external Content Delivery Network, Amazon S3.Page renders have been made substantially faster by hosting static files on the S3 platform because the Tindeck server can get on with the business of retrieving data from the database and generating the page HTML while Amazon serves up all the images, CSS and javascript at the same time.The best part is that because Amazon has a sliding scale of charges depending on how much data is stored on their network and how much bandwidth is used in a month, this change doesn't cost more than a few dollars a day to implement despite providing a major speed-boost for users.Overall, you should notice that Tindeck renders in your browser a lot faster than it did yesterday, and as we make more incremental changes to the way we serve files, and as your browser caches more and more content, you should notice the speed improve even more.If you have any questions or comments feel free to reply to this post, or you can contact me via twitter on @tindeck.