help - why's this page so slow?

[pmeenan]

Nice. The images look like the long pole now so spriting as many of the icons ans possible should be a big help. Looks like your css (and as a result, some of your images) are coming from your origin server instead of the CDN. Might be worth moving that to the CDN as well.

[JesseG]

i'll move the css images to the cdn when I get MaxCDN to cache my images. based on this result it seems like the caching isn't working.

http://www.webpagetest.org/result/110125...fc890a65c/

c.eventswholesale.com is the maxcdn CNAME hack.

[pmeenan]

Yep, looks like the caching of the images is broken because of a Vary header on the images:

Vary: Accept-Encoding

That breaks caching for images with IE I'll see if it's a more general problem with MaxMind, if so I expect it will be a very urgent fix on their side.

[pmeenan]

I don't see the Vary header on images served for WebPagetest so it might be something on your origin server (are you running Nginx?)

[JesseG]

Apache and a tomcat module.

---

for what it's worth,
comparing images on your site, served by maxcdn and from my site i see the response headers of 'my' images have two extra lines:

Response Headers:
Vary: Accept-Encoding
X-Cache: HIT

[JesseG]

seems i got the png files caching and the jpg's to return 304's (at least they won't refetch the images)
1. changing htaccess caching rules to be based on M rather than A. ex:
ExpiresActive On
ExpiresByType image/gif "M44692000"

2. purging cache via maxcdn interface

[JesseG]

BrowserMatch "MSIE" force-no-vary

added that to the htaccess file and everything's working.

[pmeenan]

Can you do it only for image/* mime types? Otherwise there's a (small) risk of problems for text content (though I guess since it's all going through MaxCDN, they would be handling that part).