KT Walrus

I was thinking about Cloudflare not as CDN but as an HTTPS server that really knows how to serve websites most efficiently. HTTP3 connections is only one example. Cloudflare is free to put in front of your site and doesn’t take much setup out of the box. Just flip a DNS switch and Cloudflare just works. If it doesn’t help, just turn it off and use Cloudflare’s DNS. But you can also optimize your site by using some of the many services Cloudflare includes in your account.

Have you looked in your browser’s dev tools to see the timeline of where the delay is coming from? Seems to me it would be related to the number of HTTPS requests and whether the browser is doing most requests in parallel. I always use Cloudflare in front of my servers to optimize page loading. Make sure you are using HTTP3 for your site. https://http3check.net/?host=preview.invisionalpha5.com

Why more images visible in second screenshot? Maybe this has something to do with lazy image loading in the first test results versus the second. Maybe hitting a case of their browser not wanting to download as many images in parallel for the v5 case. Just my initial thoughts on what might be going on… Or is there only one image for both?

Last I tried B2 with IC4, I had exceptions in IN_DEV mode. I assume you have thoroughly tested B2 IN_DEV now and everything would just work? I think the issue was that IC4 was setting an ACL on an object in the bucket when B2 only supports public or private buckets and no ability to set permissions on a path within the bucket. Also, I remember some issues with downloading attachments vs just loading as an image using the Bacblaze file URLs. I worked around these issues by just implementing my own B2 storage method using the AWS S3 SDK which avoided all compatibility issues with Backblaze’s B2 S3 API. Big advantage, especially if uploading multi-gigabytes files to IC4’s chunked uploads and then uploading the temp file to B2. If I had to do it again, I would just use flysystem composer package and flexibly store my files anywhere I wanted. Finally, I should disclose I’m a huge shareholder of Backblaze and Cloudflare since both these services don’t lock you into huge AWS storage and bandwidth bills if you ever get to a scale where infrastructure costs matters a lot. Not currently using IC4 on any of my sites, but hope to deploy an IC5 app sometime in 2025. This app will require long lived files to be stored in one bucket and short lived files (less than 90 days) in another bucket. The files will be uploaded to a 1TB Cloudflare R2 bucket and offloaded to a Backblaze B2 bucket as they age and the Cloudflare bucket cache nears the 1TB limit. Doing this because Cloudflare allows free accounts to serve unlimited bandwidth out of an R2 bucket for no bandwidth charges. Backblaze B2 has free bandwidth up to 3 times the GBs stored so it is very economical for older files that still need to be accessible online.

FWIW, I tried Minio yesterday (which is the cheapest S3 storage) and I couldn’t make it work no matter what I tried. Maybe S3 support is broken in beta 6? I had issues moving existing files using the Database storage method too. Got an exception in the move system task, and the system job wiped out my uploads folder so all files were lost. I figured beta 6 just needs more testing to make it production ready. It is possible I did something wrong, but this always has worked for me in v4.

This is probably due to the Safari on iOS having different browser defaults when in dark mode. I think you could probably fix this with some kind of CSS reset when in print mode.

With Giphy starting to charge an annual fee for their API to high usage customers, could Invision add support for the still free Tenor API? https://zuplo.com/blog/2024/11/11/migrate-giphy-api-to-tenor-api

Don’t you use only AWS? That would explain why you don’t see a performance penalty for uploading to S3. I won’t use AWS or any big cloud service. I stay away due to cost and vendor lock in. I use Backblaze B2 for user uploaded content and local Minio S3 for everything else (and temporarily storing some user content).

Last time I tried to store everything in an S3 bucket, it slowed the site down incredibly since uploading to S3 was incredibly slow. Downloading is fine though in most cases. How slow will it be to upload all those theme/css/javascript files? Is this only an issue IN_DEV or will it affect prod? Or, is most of the uploading done in a cronjob? Maybe I don’t understand how these non-user uploaded files are handled by the framework I suppose Invision has thoroughly tested the performance aspects of storing everything in an S3 bucket before making the huge decision to deprecate multiple storage methods so I should trust that this isn’t going to slow down my site from a user’s perspective. I’m worried that this is a bad decision. I wish Invision would support Flysystem for flexibly storing anything anywhere on a collection basis. Flysystem is fantastic in Laravel.

I wish Invision would use the flysystem composer package in v5. I’ve been building apps in Laravel for the past six months and it is fantastic at letting you place your storage items anywhere you want using the league/flysystem package. There are so many great PHP composer packages these days, many of which can be used in any PHP, not just in the major frameworks like Laravel or Symfony. I plan on try to use Laravel’s Illuminate/Database package for Eloquent and Query Builder in my next Invision Community v5 app. This package uses PHP’s PDO driver so hopefully I can use SQLite and Postgres for per user SQLite databases and Postgres for my “source of truth” database.

This is very bad news for me.

Yes. On my iPhone in the Safari, I hit the share button, choose Print, the tap and hold the preview of the pages near the bottom, tap to generate PDF then hit the share button again, and save the PDF to files. I think these are the steps I take to save a PDF on my iPhone. Haven’t tried it in other browsers or on my Mac since I almost always use the iPhone when browsing this site.