NYCPHP Meetup

[John Campbell]

On Sat, Jun 7, 2008 at 1:52 AM, Rob Marscher <rmarscher at beaffinitive.com> wrote:
> On Jun 6, 2008, at 2:20 PM, John Campbell wrote:
>>
>> I do use S3 to serve static content for a production site, and I have
>> been extremely pleased with the quality of the service.
>
> How much static content?  Large files only... or have you tried serving,
> say, all the images, static html, css, javascript, etc?  I seem to remember
> hearing reports early on that it wasn't necessarily the best performance for
> serving your 2k background png.  It obviously works well for stuff like
> media, photo archives, etc.  But I'm wondering if you could use it to really
> offset the number of requests and load from your web server.  Serving static
> content from apache running php is a waste of resources... but I'm wondering
> if offloading it to S3 would be better (or at least cheaper and not too much
> slower/reliable) than maintaining your own dedicated server for static
> content.
>

We are using it for static photos and videos.  The main benefit is
that it is cheap and we don't have to worry about space limitations or
bandwidth headaches.  I wouldn't recommend it for css images,
javascript, and static html for two reasons:
1) It requires 3-5 extra DNS queries, so first load will be slow.
2) There is no suitable way to gzip.

Since we buy a lot of adwords clicks, first load performance is
crucial.  I have mirrored all of the css images and javascript onto
S3, and I can flip the switch if needed, but for now we are only using
it for photos and videos.

-John C.