Item8506: Improve load time of foswiki.org pages by putting the static part (/pub) on a dedicated server / IP

As stated by WillNorris, MichaelDaum and others, there are some basic stuff which can be done to improve a web page loading time, and one of them is to serve the static stuff from as many servers as possible.

Another one is what MichaelDaum started in ImprovePageLoadTime.

Here, what I propose is the following:

Task	Implementor	Status
Create a new IP address on the foswiki.org server	gmc	Open
Create a new DNS entry pointing to this IP address, called static.foswiki.org or img.foswiki.org (or both)	SvenDowideit	Open
Configure (and install if not Apache) the web server to serve static pages from this VirtualHost		Open
Benchmark	WillNorris
Configure Foswiki to use this new VirtualHost	WillNorris	Open
Benchmark and publish results	WillNorris	Open

MichaelDaum suggested to use either nginx or lighttpd to serve static pages, as they're much faster than Apache.

Comment?

-- OlivierRaginel - 12 Feb 2010

i support this as a quick and easy short-term improvement. after this, however, we should complete the build out (we have at least 5 servers currently available, and i would be surprised if we couldn't wrestle up a good 10 more static server mirrors, including sourceforge), the next step should be to complete and deploy the CDN that sven started at the beginning of the fork.

we should investigate Cherokee, as i suspect it is better than either nginx or lighttpd, though to date i've only used lighttpd.

-- WillNorris - 12 Feb 2010

i added benchmarking tasks to the todo list.

-- WillNorris - 15 Feb 2010

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