Alfa Jango Blog Engineering, Software, and Entrepreneurship

In this article, we’re going to speed up our Rails application by up to 75%, simply by optimizing our Rails asset host. We’re going to serve our components (stylesheets, javascripts, images, etc.) from a combination of our app’s server and Amazon CloudFront (Option A, recommended), or entirely from CloudFront (Option B – easier).

The best option for you may depend on your specific needs, but I’ll cover both processes below. For a an in-depth analysis of why Option A is recommended over Option B, see the last article in this series, How to Combine GZip + CDN for Fastest Page Loads.

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In my last post, I discussed the three techniques used to improve asset load speed. In this post, I will discuss how to combine the use of GZipping and a Content Delivery Network (CDN) for the fastest possible page loads.

Pitfall of Amazon S3 + CloudFront

Everyone’s favorite CDN these days is Amazon’s CloudFront service, which serves files directly from Amazon’s scalable “simple storage system”, Amazon S3. It is very easy to work with, has widespread support in Ruby gems and plugins (and countless other libraries), and is very inexpensive with it’s pay-as-you-go billing.

However, there is one large pitfall to using Amazon S3 + CloudFront, and that is that neither S3 nor CloudFront support GZip detecting and encoding. It would seem that we need to now decide whether we’ll do without GZipping or using a CDN. Not so! There is another way.

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Page load speed is becoming increasingly important as rich web applications become more interactive. It’s not just about usability anymore; it can now directly affect your placement in search engine results, now that Google uses page load speed in their ranking algorithm. Are you ready for a reality check? Get Google Webmaster Tools for your site, and go to the Labs >> Site Performance to view your average page load time, as seen by Google’s web crawlers. That’s right, Google is already tracking your site’s performance history.

Google Webmaster Tools is even kind enough to tell you how you stack up against the rest of the web. Here is what Webmaster Tools had to say about one of our sites before optimizing it for quick page loading:

On average, pages in your site take 4.5 seconds to load (updated on Feb 21, 2010). This is slower than 70% of sites. These estimates are of low accuracy (fewer than 100 data points). The chart below shows how your site’s average page load time has changed over the last few months. For your reference, it also shows the 20th percentile value across all sites, separating slow and fast load times.

Ouch. Did I mention this would be a painful reality check?

Now to be fair, there’s a very reasonable explanation for this. Google claims that the majority of users will click “back” to the search results page if a link takes too long to load. So, if a webpage is too slow for the visitor to read it, the relevance of the content is…well, irrelevant. I should point out, however, that it’s unknown precisely how much page load speed affects your placement in search results.

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