Speed SEO - flavor of the month

Well I've been looking at speed for a while now and trying (and trying again) to up the speed of the site.

A recent google webmaster blog/video just confirmed this

Just wondering if anyone has figured out the following...

1. Parrilize downloads? I've seen some posts that say they've done it but HOW?
2. Combine CSS/Javascript, how? which mod do you use?
3. Leverage browser caching?

I can see that VBSEO has got 3. and 2. down, but no indication or posts on how they did it

I get 74/100 on my homepage
VBSEO gets 80/100 on theirs

Anyone get higher/lower?

1) you can do this using subdomains, but it requires some code hacking as vb doesn't have provisions for it native. I set one up for my avatars. While they are still stored in the same oem location for uploads etc, I edited the postbit code and hard coded it to pull from my subdomain. I pointed avatars.mysite.com at public_html/customavatars

as i'm still on vb3.8, i changed

class_postbit.php
line 635
$this->post['avatarurl'] = $this->registry->options['avatarurl'] . '/avatar' . $this->post['userid'] . '_' . $this->post['avatarrevision'] . '.gif';

to

$this->post['avatarurl'] = 'http://avatars.mydomain.com' . '/avatar' . $this->post['userid'] . '_' . $this->post['avatarrevision'] . '.gif';

I also set the www to non-www that i use in hataccess to account for the subdomain use:

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

so that avatars subdomain will not redirect to just mydomain.com



You can similar tings for other icons/graphics etc that load on most pages.

2) i do not know if a mod exists for this. vb4 has some native combinations on css when stored as files. I would suggest using the file instead of inline method if at all possible. There is a yui component that runs command line:
YUI Compressor
but that is not supported and will require a lot of work to stay on top of everytime you change anything.

3) caching, mod_expires is what most people use. I've found it very buggy and it cached things that shouldn't be cached and it wreaked havoc on new posts displaying correctly.

Code:

  <IfModule mod_expires.c>
   ExpiresActive on
   ExpiresByType image/gif "access plus 1 months"
   ExpiresDefault "access plus 1 days"
  </IfModule>

The default is the killer, as it puts threads in the cache as well, and thus, won't pick up new posts in your browser without a hard refresh.
setting it to 5 min or less all but kills the point of it but is even a bit annoying to users on a popular thread. They will see a new response on forumhome, but when they view the thread, its not there as the cached page loads instead.

Parrilize downloads seems to be the most realistic and easiest implemented, would you be able to provide us with vB4 instructions? I would love to see such a feature integrated into vBSEO or even another separate modification.

As setting up subdomains, etc is not something that a script can do, i doubt this will ever be offered.

It would be nice if VBSEO would help by providing a step by step guide to it though...

Is it just a case of

Change the code in postbit
create the subdomain
place the rewrite code into the.htaccess of the subdomain

?

Pretty much.
it might even be possible to use a plugin/product instead of a hard-code edit to over-ride the path in
$this->registry->options['avatarurl']

I haven't looked into this on vb4 yet as i've yet to upgrade any of my production sites to it as of yet.

And this can be extended 10 ways...
css.
icons.
attachments.
js.

and so on making subdomains for each section

Okay will have to look into it (template edits would make it a pain in the a)

Do you think these modifications would be worth it :: Articles - vBulletin 4 Optimization

Discussed in this vb.com thread - http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showt...ighlight=speed

Most of those seem ok... the problem is maintenance on it. Evey time you update vb, you will need to do those all over again.

Just the thread I wanted to post in, what do you think of this?

vBulletin 4 optimized .htaccess | David McHenry

Using things like that are fine, but there will be cache issues.

ie, Bob goes in and changes his avatar... avatar_123.gif
avatar_123.gif is already cached in his browser from previous page loads.
He views a thread again, and still see's his old avatar until the mod header forces the browser to do a full 200 instead of a 304 not modified response (which pulls from browser cache)
a manual refresh (shift + f5) will force a hard reload and it will appear, but many users will be confused and end up trying to load their avatar multiple times and appearing to them as not being successful.

vb prevents js and css caching when they use the version control on it, ie script.js?v=385. the ?v (or any param) tells browsers that this is not a static item and loads it as a 200 direct pull no matter what.
This prevents users from having invalid tokens, etc after upgrading to the next version that may have had a js change in it's methods, etc.

So, there's certainly drawbacks to doing things like this. There's a happy medium somewhere.....

if you added a subdomain called 'customavatars' and did a template replacement to swapout

www.domain.com/customavatars/

with

customavatars.domain.com/

That would work OK, wouldn't it (and the same with all static content)?

I was unsuccessful in using the replacement variables, as it changes all paths... This created some issues during uploads. I only want it to PULL from the subdomain basically as a 'reference' to the real location

You can achieve that with a plugin