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> How does this shit make it to the front page? Obviously the title was a little ridiculous, but I up-voted it, because it's a novel idea. If you're planning

> How does this shit make it to the front page? Obviously the title was a little ridiculous, but I up-voted it, because it's a novel idea. If you're planning to have almost all of your static assets hosted from the CDN (which is pretty reasonable for almost everyone) then why bother with a super high-throughput low-latency web server if the only purpose is to occasionally refill the CDN? If you end up thrashing the CDN and constantly going back to refill it, you're going to have bigger problems. From what I can tell, the rest of your comment is just super aggressive and doesn't really go anywhere. I will tell you that I have extensive experience with every piece you've mentioned here, and none of that really has any effect on the author's thesis (again, no need to optimize serving static content from your host if a CDN is going to do the legwork). In general though, when someone works at Mozilla, I tend to give them the benefit of the doubt regarding their knowledge of elementary computing principles.

ldng 14y ago
I think it still worth it. You can't have 100% availability. Even AWS sometimes fails. It's then just a matter of changing DNS record and have your server(s) handle the load in some kind of degraded mode. Peripheral but somewhat relevant, at work, we don't upload photos immediately to S3. We have to pre-process them but as soon as they are ready, we show them to the customer serving then locally. And only then upload them to S3. I treat a CDN as a cache, great to have but I wouldn't exclusively rely on it. For whatever reason, you might need to degrade or show results asap, you can't do that if the CDN is the primary source.
peterwwillis 14y ago
The problem is this isn't a novel idea. Replacing a fast webserver with somebody else's fast webserver is half of the reason most people choose CDN's (the other reason usually being bandwidth). Just using someone else's fast webserver does not obsolete a different fast webserver. It's totally acceptable that you might not have the infrastructure to serve all of your static content from your measely web servers and 100mbit connection. CDNs are a great choice here. But this has nothing to do with what web server you use, nor does it mean you should process every request dynamically just because right now you have the resources for it using a CDN. Even with a CDN and an extremely efficient static content layer, you still have to hand out dynamic content to your users individually which a CDN generally will not help with. At a high enough number of requests you will run out of resources (RAM, CPU, Disk, Network, etc). At this point it's handy to have the fastest things you can so scaling doesn't become one huge clusterfuck. Then whoever re-implements Nginx to help handle requests will write a blog post about how Nginx makes CDNs obsolete. My point before (and now) is: Caching matters, and having a fast frontend web server matters, and CDNs matter, and none of this is directly related: we're talking apples and oranges. As an aside, CloudFlare seems to use a novel little fast web server: psypete@pinhead ~/ :) wget -S -O /dev/null http://4chan.org/ 2>&1 | grep -e "^[[:space:]]\+Server:" Server: cloudflare-nginx Server: cloudflare-nginx

ldng 14y ago

I think it still worth it. You can't have 100% availability. Even AWS sometimes fails. It's then just a matter of changing DNS record and have your server(s) handle the load in some kind of degraded mode. Peripheral but somewhat relevant, at work, we don't upload photos immediately to S3. We have to pre-process them but as soon as they are ready, we show them to the customer serving then locally. And only then upload them to S3. I treat a CDN as a cache, great to have but I wouldn't exclusively rely on it. For whatever reason, you might need to degrade or show results asap, you can't do that if the CDN is the primary source.

peterwwillis 14y ago

The problem is this isn't a novel idea. Replacing a fast webserver with somebody else's fast webserver is half of the reason most people choose CDN's (the other reason usually being bandwidth). Just using someone else's fast webserver does not obsolete a different fast webserver. It's totally acceptable that you might not have the infrastructure to serve all of your static content from your measely web servers and 100mbit connection. CDNs are a great choice here. But this has nothing to do with what web server you use, nor does it mean you should process every request dynamically just because right now you have the resources for it using a CDN. Even with a CDN and an extremely efficient static content layer, you still have to hand out dynamic content to your users individually which a CDN generally will not help with. At a high enough number of requests you will run out of resources (RAM, CPU, Disk, Network, etc). At this point it's handy to have the fastest things you can so scaling doesn't become one huge clusterfuck. Then whoever re-implements Nginx to help handle requests will write a blog post about how Nginx makes CDNs obsolete. My point before (and now) is: Caching matters, and having a fast frontend web server matters, and CDNs matter, and none of this is directly related: we're talking apples and oranges. As an aside, CloudFlare seems to use a novel little fast web server: psypete@pinhead ~/ :) wget -S -O /dev/null http://4chan.org/ 2>&1 | grep -e "^[[:space:]]\+Server:" Server: cloudflare-nginx Server: cloudflare-nginx