Hi,



I've read about how retrieving your images from another server may take some load off your server. - Is that even true?
Is this possible?
Is this even worth the effort?

It can, yes. It's not worth doing unless your site is really large. If it is, you can put static images on one server, not run any of the additional stuff (php, perl, mod_rewrite, etc. etc. etc.) and that server will be quite zippy. All the requests for images that normally hit your main server will instead be forwarded to the other server, so it has less requests to process for simple things like images.

There are other tweaks that can be done if you did go this route. On a smaller site it may not even be worth the effort. On a larger multi-server site it definitely is.

Would this function be here?
Tools & Settings > General Configuration > Caching PATH

Could I enter a URL that is offsite? How would that be formatted?

Caching path is mainly meant if you are running multiple IPB installations from one server - it would allow you to share some of the files between the sites.

However there is a similar setting "images url" that you can use which will point all the image requests to wherever the url points.

 

Caching path is mainly meant if you are running multiple IPB installations from one server - it would allow you to share some of the files between the sites.

However there is a similar setting "images url" that you can use which will point all the image requests to wherever the url points.

How do you set up the image server using the "images url"? Do you have to duplicate the directory structure or just have all the images in one directory?

Does this include every single image including skin images or just uploads and avatars?

Also how do you allow access to a remote server for uploads?