Faster & more flexible CDN integration — make Drupal twice as fast!

UPDATE: this session was merged with Konstantin Käfer's Front End Performance - Making Drupal Lightning Fast session!

90% of the page loading time is spent on retrieving CSS, JavaScript and images. There are many techniques to reduce the page loading time — using a CDN is one of the most effective. Currently it's expensive to integrate with a CDN (especially if you want to avoid vendor lock-in) and it's hard to serve file A from a CDN, file B from a static file server and file C from neither. It's also impossible to process a file (e.g. compress JavaScript, optimize images, transcode videos …) before they are synced to the CDN.

This session will explain how a CDN (Content Delivery Network) improves page loading times and how you should continuously analyze the page loading performance of your web site. Older techniques for integrating a CDN with Drupal will be compared and my new, alternative, comprehensive solution will be presented.
All the research and work performed for this presentation was part of my bachelor thesis at Hasselt University, which got the highest score possible: 19/20 (they never hand out a perfect score). It was labeled as being equivalent to a master thesis. So at least, you can expect the concept to be solid.

For the web site that served as the test case of my bachelor thesis, which had less than 5 images per page, the results were dramatic: the time required to load CSS, JS and images was reduced to less than half the original time, globally (visitors from more than 150 countries)! A combination of a North-American CDN and a static file server in Belgium was used to achieve this.
The average web site today has 50 images per page, so it's likely your results will be even more impressive.

Agenda

• What is page loading performance?
• How a CDN improves page loading times
• Continuous page loading performance analysis through Episodes
• Older Drupal CDN integration techniques
• The new CDN integration module
• The new daemon to process & sync files with unlimited flexibility
• Alternative uses for the daemon: create your own CDN, massive back-up tool, transcoding server (Media Mover integration?) …

Goals

• You should have a good overview of the different techniques to integrate Drupal with a CDN.
• You should have learned how you can continuously evaluate page loading performance to detect problems and bottlenecks.
• You should have learned about the benefits of using the daemon: reduced cost, no more vendor lock-in …