How-To Set up your CDN

Originally Posted by Mert Gökçeimam

Hello Steve ,

We are sorry you are having bad experience however everyone else uses this feature without any issue. The problem is either you're not following article correct or you're not understanding it fully.

... or there could be a third option that the documentation was not properly edited and formatted as a technical document. As I have read it there appears to be typos, logical errors, incomplete and/or missing information, incomplete and/or missing ideas, a flow-of-consciousness technique that jumped around when simple categories with headers that contained bullet points would have worked MUCH better IMO than a conversational style of writing ...

Actually, reading through this thread there seem to be a number of people that have had issues that are the same issues that I have faced. So your statement "... everyone else uses this feature without any issue." is confusing to me as it does not appear to be correct and appears to make it my fault. Perhaps you can explain what you meant by this, because I seem to remember getting this answer before (something like "40,000 other people use this system without blah blah blah" - which again is the argumentum ad populem logical fallacy).

My status is that CDN is working on my site now, but it was so slow that pages were taking no less than 30 seconds and upwards of 1 minute to timeout. My major problem came when I was not certain how to handle potential htaccess changes, so when the suspected rewrite issues are interfering with CDN through vbSEO I must wonder if this module was hastily implemented as those should not really be issues.

update: I was getting a 302 error on MAXCDN when I did the IP test on their site, so it's an htaccess issue.

I think what I'm going to have to do it is probably just dump vbseo and go back to native vbulletin tomorrow morning and hope that this month-long nightmare is just about over.

You're 98% of the way there. Don't give up now.

If you're getting a 302, you must've missed the 'Making Exceptions' link to the www vs non-www link from the main article here. You have to 'or' case all your cnames so that they are not redirected by the htaccess file.

Originally Posted by Brian Cummiskey

You're 98% of the way there. Don't give up now.

If you're getting a 302, you must've missed the 'Making Exceptions' link to the www vs non-www link from the main article here. You have to 'or' case all your cnames so that they are not redirected by the htaccess file.

Thanks man! I was in a bad place when I responded before. I had it working I think but I was dealing with some incomplete advice from my server host I think on the rewritebase command in the htaccess file (and some of my own lack of knowledge).

I am getting constant pageloads in the 5-second range without CDN so I will tackle this overnight or early morning one day this week and we will try again.

Well after a few weeks using it I have had to disable CDN due to it slowing the site down.

I contacted CDN for an explanation and they say there Amsterdam server is being Dos attacked, it's been going on for too long now,

See stats after having it going live.



Also Amsterdam Server is up like this all the time, all my members in the uk can't view our board, it looks a mess.



Also my adsense income has dropped drematically after being with CDN, gone from average of 13 pounds a day to now between 3 and 5 pounds per day.

I will be lucky to clear this months server payment.

NEVER AGAIN!.

The 'site speed' report from webmasters tools is likely pulling from the California server, not Amsterdam, as Google is based out of California, USA. It is normal for it to fluctuate a bit like a Sin curve as they constantly test different urls, and some simply take longer to load than others.


If the company you are with doesn't support your local traffic levels, there are always other companies to try, some that may have more peers in more locales closer to you/your membership.

Hello,

I'm setting up MaxCDN through vBSEO and it seems to be working fine, thanks for the simple instructions and supporting MaxCDN directly through vBSEO. I'm waiting on some more cnames to propagate but currently using cdn.mydomain.com with a single zone for images and avatars. I quickly tested js/css and that seems to work fine too.

That said, the initial tests show that the single most important image is not loaded from the CDN. I have such a "single most important" image because I'm using the sprite image/css mod, i.o.w. it's the sprite-x.png file that is not loaded from the CDN, or better: the entire /images/sprites/ folder is skipped.

I read and understand the disclaimer in post #1, but needless to say loading this 60K image from the cdn nodes would "help". I'd be happy with a workaround, for example set up a push zone just for that sprites folder.

I made sure the urls in the CSS are relative, and I tried various custom rules, no desired results so far so any help would be appreciated.

THanks!

It's also possible that the css sprite mod needs its execution order changed so that it fires off before vbseo does. In most cases, vbseo runs first.

You may need to revert to using a template replacement with the vb replacement manager

Thanks for the reply. In that case I think I will go for curtain 2.

using a template replacement with the vb replacement manager

Can you elaborate? Should I basically replace all instances of "http://www.mydomain.com/images/sprites/" with "http://cdn.mydomain.com/images/sprites/" ? I'd still have to use a custom rule in that case right? to point /images/sprites/ => http://cdn.mydomain.com/images/sprites/

Yup, pretty much. see: HowTo: Configure Vbulletin To Use A Content Delivery Network (CDN) for an article about using vb replacements in step 5

Excellent, just did a quick test with /banners/ (another dir with images) and it's working. Waiting on the rest of my cnames to propagate before I do the rest.

Thanks again Brian.

Got it all up and running now, 4 different cnames for pull zones(images, avatars, cdn, and ads), one push for "downloads". I configured vBSEO to use a single pull zone but use custom rules and replacement variables for cnames other than .cdn.

My average page load time (Webmaster Tools) was 3.2sec, went up to 4sec, but I did notice some connection issues while it's propagating and that's only over the first day I set it up - so I assume that'll drop again once stabilized. Webpagetest.org results do show a significant improvement, about 1 second off for CMS and forum pages, threads much more. Comparing to what I read about other forums mine are pretty fast already (dedicated server+xcache+sprites) so I didn't expect a 50% improvement anyway, but I really how it is reducing the loads of my dedicated server thereby increasing it's lifetime.

However, I'm having an odd problem: on the homepage (CMS) it still loads /clientscript/vbulletin-core.js from www.mydomain.com instead of cdn.domain.com. On all other pages (CMS and forums) it does load the core js from the cdn. Any ideas what might cause the homepage to behave exceptional?

The CDN is not perfect. Please remember this is our first iteration of the product and it will be improved with time. There are several other known similar urls that are missed.

I'm trying to modify my httpd.config file to allow exceptions.. I use httpd.config instead of .htaccess.

my subdomains are called:
images
static
avatars

Would this be correct.

Code:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !(^www\.buggiesgonewild\.com$|^images\.buggiesgonewild\.com$|^static\.buggiesgonewild\.com|^avatars\.buggiesgonewild\.com$)
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.buggiesgonewild.com/$1 [L,R=301]

Currently its

Code:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.buggiesgonewild\.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.buggiesgonewild.com/$1 [L,R=301]

I dont have this enabled in vbseo yet, I have set up the pull zones at maxcdn and my cnames in cpanel. I can load the subdomains in a browser and I get my index page. I assume its working correctly so far.

Hello Johnny ,

It looks correct