Version 3.0 Beta Test FeedBack

Hello!

This is just to share with you a great experience I had with PB3.

Because of the YSlow recommendations I've been thinking on using a CDN to store my images and media files.  My skins (from Evan Oneil) are using a lot of gifs and some of them include SWF animations for the logos and banners as well.

Then I discovered Amazon S3 and I realized that it's very fast, very very cheap (0.15$ x GB x month) and very easy to integrate. So I opened an account with them and I uploaded all my static images to a Amazon S3 datacenter. A nice thing about Amazon S3 is that you can register a CNAME entry in the DNS and point it to their servers.

Now all my images and media objects are hosted in a domain called like: media.mydomain.com. And therefore are hosted and served by Amazon S3.

Finally I used a very simple rule in PB3 to change all the requests to images from local to the new subdomain hosted by AmazonS3.

< searchFor >"(/Portals/_default/.*?\.(gif|jpg|swf)")< /searchFor >

< replaceWith >"http://media.mydomain.com$1< /replaceWith >

With PB I can plug and unplug the CDN as needed without any skin modifiation. It’s fantastic!!!!

Needles to say that my site scales and performs now much better than before.

dani

Amazon S3

http://www.amazon.com/gp/browse.html?node=16427261

Does YSlow view Amazon as a CDN for your pages?

Running YSlow on Amazon's pages rate as an F and recommends a CDN.  Not that YSlow's score is anywhere as important as speeding up ones actual site, it is the metric that we are using for the moment.

/DaveS

No, yslow did not recognise it.  I had to add it manually as a CDN on the YSlow settings. :-(

But I did it mainly to improve the performance and save bandwith.

Unfortunately use an supported YSlow CDN is out of my budget

Hi Everyone,

Sorry for the delay in responding. I've been working on getting the ScriptResource.axd files to be included in the optimization, and as you may have noticed there are some javascript errors that I have been battling with. It's very close now though.  If you check my site with YSlow the ScriptResource.axd files are being processed by PageBlaster.

There is still an issue with the FCK editor here in the forums using FireFox which I will get resolved shortly.

I also have the cache delete buttons added to the interface for the next build which led me in a direction to structure the folders in the cache a little differently.  I'm still checking all that out too, but I should have a new build soon.

Thanks for the great feedback Dani.  I switched my site to using Amazon S3 for a little while, but I noticed it would get hung looking for an image sometimes.  Since I couldn't figure out how to make it visible to YSlow by default I took it back out, but it does help to have your images and/or other resources on a different host name so that they can download in parallel.  I'll have to look into that one again.

Just testing a post with FireFox.  It looks like I was able to resolve the issues with PageBlaster and the FCK editor in FireFox by *not* excluding the FCK folder.

Hi John

Regarding the feature to not cache if the http response code isn't 200:

The goal was to not cache if an error occurs with a module on a page.  The problem is that if the message "An error has occurred" is displayed due to a module error, the page response code is 200 as the page is successfully served.

Would it be possible to allow for a site-wide rule to be applied that accepts a string to search for in the page response and if that string is found to not cache?  Or would this be too much of a performance hog in parsing all page responses.

I'm not keen on changing the page response code to if a module error occurs as this could impact site crawlers?

What do you recommend?

Thanks
Grant

Hi Grant,

I have added a new Rule Token that will make it possible for you to disable caching based on searching in the output of the text.

I just installed the new version here on Snapsis and I'll release it later on if all goes smooth.

The PB function to use in the response field of the rule will be:

I have a couple of questions.  I've just installed V3 and it appears not to be loading the skin.css for my portals.

I have some performance options set on the DNN site (whitespace removal, gzip compression) should these all be switched off?

This is the line I have in my config file, but I'm not sure if it is generating debug and less sure as to where the ouput file will be found (trace level="debug" file-path="/PageBlaster.trace.config" /) - Could someone post an example for me

I'm guessing from the changes already implemented that I do not need to make any further changes to the web.config file.

Many thanks

 trace is working now, but I don't see anything significant - beginner eyes I guess!

I give the cache a try although, looking a bit deeper, my portals display more or less perfetly in IE7 (I've seen one small problem on tables and with RadMenu) - I'm just experiencing the problem in Firefox (2.0.0.12) - no .css is loaded.

If you haven't installed FireBug and the YSlow plugin then I highly recommend doing both.

The more I use these tools the more I'm impressed with the in-depth under the covers look you can get to what is happening on your web pages.

addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1843

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5369

John,

I installed PB 3.0.8 on a dnn installation (4.8.0)  where PB has never been installed before and when I open the Administration \ Snapis page it's empty: the PB module to configure portal-wide replacements is missing.

However the page-level module works fine when added to an ordinary page.

I don't get any visible error, no errors on the dnn event viewer, no errors in the pb trace file.  I tried  to use the config file from a portal where PB is working fine without sucess. I also copied the dlls and DesktopModules\Snapis folder from a working installation and the result is the same. I compared also the module definitions between them and they looks like pretty the same.

any clue?

thanks,

dani