EVE Technology Lab

Hi.

Earlier today on IRC, we were discussing the speed and usage of the CCP image server, that everyone uses, and came to the conclution that it's not exactly the fastest thing in the world. Plus it's located in a single location, so it's not even CDN based, further bottlenecking it.

FoxFour did however mention that CCP has a CDN, where the images are stored, http://images.cdn1.eveonline.com/
But it doesn't support https.

I don't have specific metrics showcasing the slowness of the CCP Image server, but for EVE-KILL.net / zKillboard.com we ran an image proxy some months ago, which greatly increased the load time of the images (By using cloudflare's network to cache and serve the images, using spdy over ssl)

If there is a chance CCP can do the same, it will greatly increase the speed of the image server as a whole, which will lead to faster load times for our websites, and to happier people.

tl;dr: image server slow, make cdn with http/https (and preferably spdy support)

edit://
List of CDNs that are currently available for usage

https://cdn.eve-kill.net/ - Hosted on KeyCDN, and mirrors the EVE image server 1:1, except it's multi-regional and faster than the image server everywhere except the majority of Europe, where CCPs image server has better response time.

I'll add more as they come up, i know SobanVuex has one he's working on, with multiregion support, spdy and geodns.

Any chance someone, you guys or otherwise, can post some metrics? What kind of speed do you see from it and what would you expect?

I guess that's why other companies create additional main domains for static content like twimg.com so they don't have to share their main ssl certificate with the CDN Provider

As you ask why do you care about some "bad" pngs or using https in the first place -

I ask you why would you NOT use TLS on any service.
Security boosts the confidence of consumers.
Security boosts your data safety.
Recent software releases (spdy) boosts the performance of TLS to speeds better than regular HTTP.

WHY WOULD YOU NOT USE HTTPS?

Not using/providing TLS limits both you and any other entity relying on your service.

1. HTTPS websites expect everything to be coming from HTTPS, otherwise you get nasty warnings, in some cases you might even get nothing at all. Since the browser actively refuses to download anything from the non HTTPS address.

2. HTTPS is a hot topic atm, plus there is the whole "It's not detrimental to your experience, it's infact boosting your experience by making you feel safer". So, why not use https?

3. There are things like SPDY, that can infact speed up your browsing experience by doing cool stuff that regular HTTP doesn't do. And SPDY uses HTTPS to do it, so, yet another upside

In other news, Soban and myself have begun work on something that will most likely be rather beneficial for everyone, atleast till CCP gets their thumbs out of their ass, and does it instead

[Edit: Off topic part removed, CCP Phantom]

The reason I asked the question is nothing I saw said you were directing your site users to the image server. In that case even have things coming from a different domain get flagged in the browser depending on the user settings so I see that as a non-issue in that I would always have them served from my domain to start with instead. In that case it's my backend doing the call to CCP if it's not cached so doesn't matter to my users really what the connection is because they never see it.

[Edit: Off topic part removed, CCP Phantom]

Off topic parts got removed. Please stay on topic, follow the forum rules and be polite, thank you!

the use of a CDN for the image servers would greatly improve load time on images.
I can recommend AKAMAI for CDN stuff, they have a large network and servers all over the world (literally everywhere).

For the sites I am maintaining, I've implemented a "php proxy" which stores the images locally, and only updates them like once a week when the image gets requested again. Works flawless and transparent. I can upload the code if anyone is interested.

images.cdn1.eveonline.com has no https tho, so the idea of using that goes out the window real fast.
As for SPDY / HTTP multiplexing, SPDY can do it much faster than regular HTTP can, since HTTP does pipelining, and it will max open 4-16 pipes, depending on the browser/browser settings. SPDY however requests multiple assets over the same connection, sometimes 2 sometimes over 50 - all depends on the speed.

Plus the HTTP pipelining has to negotiate a new connection pr. pipeline, adding to the overhead, it's really bad with https for example. Where SPDY only has to negotiate once

Updated the first post with links to currently usable CDNs (There's only one atm, but i'm sure more will be added)