Is it possible to run ENTIRE site (not just images, etc) via CDN?

[whei]

(03-25-2012 02:42 AM)Lennie Wrote:  Very much doubt it and especially not currently. CDN77 has only started this month to put up their website. The basic things in the control panel is now mostly usable.

Have a look at the documentation of the software that is used:

http://help.aflexi.net/ (maybe there are slightly differences between OnApp which CDN77 uses and Aflexi but doubt it)

I think it is meant for handling static files.

The webserver software is nginx, here is the documentation of that:

http://wiki.nginx.org/Modules

Especially the proxy/cache module:
http://wiki.nginx.org/HttpProxyModule

And extra backend control headers:
http://wiki.nginx.org/X-accel

I asked support if the X-Accel-Expires was supported, but they didn't tell me it was.

I tried two CDN POPs Amsterdam, NL and Raleigh, US and in both cases X-Accel-Expires did work to control the caching behaviour on the proxy from the server. Still that isn't even close to the same as HTTP-rules of course (!)

There is even an example how nginx needs to be configured to do what you want:

http://wiki.nginx.org/HttpProxyModule#proxy_no_cache

But it doesn't work because something like that doesn't belong in the default configuration of nginx.

Some documentation I found on one of both sites mentioned:
https://code.google.com/p/ncache/

But that seems kind of silly to me, if they are then they are running an old version of nginx or just use that to make it easy to explain to people how efficient it is.

Something else that caught my eye:

"By default, the content expiry of all resources is set to 60 minutes, and it can be changed."

I don't know if it is the expire time for the browser or the CDN POP cache, if it is the later that would kind of defeat the purpose of a CDN.

As far as I'm concerned, you can set force cache on all your files @ your origin to 'never expire' and the edge servers will obey that.

That's only recommended on a full site cache if you do not run any dynamic content or rarely updated contents. Else you need to purge it manually to get new content into the CDN.