CDN + Minify = slower?

[tomturd2]

I've set my site up to use MaxCDN and optimised it pretty much everywhere. ySlow and pagerank were showing 80/100 ish.

Unfortunately, enabling 'minify javascript' (which causes css to be minified too!) seems to cause a redirect to the root of the site which is increasing the page load time.

I've been using pingdom.com to monitor page load speeds.

Here is a test when css was minified:

http://tools.pingdom.com/default.asp?url=http%3a%2f%2fwww.trials-forum.co.uk%2f&id=4240529 (page load time: 2.12 seconds)

If you click 'show link heirarchy' you can see a redirect happening after the CSS is called, and its loading the whole of the site root again.

Here is a test with minification disabled:

http://tools.pingdom.com/default.asp?url=http%3a%2f%2fwww.trials-forum.co.uk%2f&id=4240546 (page load time: 1.38 seconds)

What I don't understand is, in the first instance, with css being minified and the request getting redirected, how was it loading CSS at all? The site looked fine!

Now, with minification disabled, the load time has impoved, but my yslow and page speed ranks have been downgraded.

Can I get the best of both worlds?

[Gaffney]

Mintify won't massively boost your sites speed. Maybe you should try mintify it a different way ?

[tomturd2]

Mintify won't massively boost your sites speed. Maybe you should try mintify it a different way ?

It saves about 10 http requests, which would be a fairly decent performance improvement if it didn't redirect to root.

I don't really have any other options. mod_pagespeed does a similar thing, but I've heard bad things about it.

Ideally ipb should use minify to create the minified JS/CSS, then link directly to the cached files rather than routing it through index.php each time - is this something that could make it into 3.2?

[cthree]

It only matters on hit 1. After that your css and js should be browser cached. Turn off minify.

[tomturd2]

It only matters on hit 1. After that your css and js should be browser cached. Turn off minify.

I understand that and I appreciate you taking the time to reply, but I'm concerned about googles impression of how fast my site is loading (not very fast according to webmaster tools), I'm losing points in pagespeed because I'm not using minify, and when I do use minify my site is even slower (see first post...).


Can anyone help with my question? I don't need people to explain the benefits/drawbacks of minify. I know already!

[Luke]

For standard libraries like Prototype or jQuery (or even their plugins) you can use Google (they host these files and allow you to link to them). This is better because if other sites are using the same libraries it's likely that they will already be pre-cached on the clients machine. When you minify (not sure how MaxCDN works) you want to make sure that it's not being done on-the-fly. The reason for this is static content takes much less time to load than dynamic content. The web server also handles the caching headers for you on static files.

You can also probably tweak your hosting configuration (if you have access to it) to configure Apache to server the pages a little faster (giving it more memory, removing un-necessary plugins, turning off .htaccess and doing stuff in the config instead, etc.. it's already a memory hog). A PHP opcode cache also helps out quite a bit (although doesn't work well with php-fcgi). If you want absolute performance and have the ability it's better to ditch Apache in favor of a Nginx + PHP-FPM setup.