CDN

The first release of the CDN module for Drupal was 9.5 years ago yesterday: cdn 5.x-1.0-beta1 was released on January 8, 2008!

Excitement

On January 27, 2008, the first RC followed, with boatloads of new features. Over the years, it was ported to Drupal 6¹, 7 and 8 and gained more features (I effectively added every single feature that was requested — I loved empowering the site builder). I did the same with my Hierarchical Select module.

I was a Computer Science student for the first half of those 9.5 years, and it was super exciting to see people actually use my code on hundreds, thousands and even tens of thousands of sites! In stark contrast with the assignments at university, where the results were graded, then discarded.

Speed up your Drupal site with a CDN in a few minutes.

The fun part: it’s nice to learn how to make any Drupal site significantly faster in a few minutes. The profit part: faster websites lead to more users and more revenue.

This article covers the common case: you have a small to medium size (≤1M page views per month), without massive amounts of large images, you’re using Drupal 7¹ and you only want to spend a few euros or (U.S.) dollars per month on a CDN. (You already know what a CDN is, right?)
So, you want your Drupal site to be faster, only spend a few minutes doing so, don’t want to deal with infrastructure and want to keep the costs very minimal. You’ve come to the right place.

Also: don’t worry about the cost: this little experiment will only cost you a few cents.

In this final article in my bachelor thesis series, I explain how I proved that the work I had done for my bachelor thesis (which includes the Episodes module, the Episodes Server module, the CDN integration module and File Conveyor) actually had a positive impact on page loading performance. For that, I converted a fairly high-traffic web site to Drupal, installed File Conveyor to optimize & sync files to both a static file server and an FTP Push CDN, used the CDN integration module to serve files from either the static file server or the FTP Push CDN (the decision to pick either of those two is based on the visitor’s location, i.e. the IP address), measure the results using Episodes and prove the positive impact using Episodes Server’s charts.

Previously in this series:

In this article, I explain the rationale behind the CDN integration module for Drupal 6, which was written as part of my bachelor thesis. It supports integration with both Origin Pull CDNs (out-of-the-box) and Push CDNs (by using File Conveyor).
Note that development of version 2 of this module has already begun! Version two will also be ported to Drupal 7.

Previously in this series:

In this article, which was in fact written in January—February 2008 (well over two years ago), I explain what the benefit is of using a CDN and how the then-new CDN integration module 1.x for Drupal 5 could help you do that for a cheap FTP Push CDN.
This was in fact more of a proof of concept module and therefore this Drupal 5 version of the CDN integration module is no longer supported. This article has been published because it would otherwise only been gathering dust. It will give you a better view on Drupal’s history for supporting CDNs, i.e. how hacky this solution is in comparison with its follower, the CDN integration module for Drupal 6.

In this extensive article, I explain the architecture of the “File Conveyor” daemon that I wrote to detect files immediately (through the file system event monitors on each OS, i.e. inotify on Linux), process them (e.g. recompress images, compress CSS/JS files, transcode videos …) and finally, sync them (FTP, Amazon S3, Amazon CloudFront and Rackspace CloudFiles are supported).

Previously in this series:

• Page loading profiling tools
• Improving Drupal: Episodes integration
• Key Properties of a CDN

So now that we have the tools to accurately (or at least representatively) measure the effects of using a CDN, we still have to start using a CDN. Next, we will examine how a web site can take advantage of a CDN.

I will be presenting together with Konstantin Käfer on Front End Performance. To be more exact, he will be talking about Front End Performance in general, and I will be talking about a subdomain of that: CDN integration.
Our sessions were merged because they overlapped to some extent — so now there’s just one supercharged session instead! It’s scheduled for Thursday (3 September), at 9 AM, in the La Reserre (translated: coal-shed) room.

In specific, I will be talking about the work I’ve been doing as part of my bachelor thesis. Integrating Drupal with a CDN was quite painful previously, but by using the CDN integration module, you can choose for either: