our aviation website magic flight was tested now. What i don’t understand in this is the etag. Why is etag unnecessary. And does using a cdn like maxcdn speed up the site(Practically).
Please answer.
Long live flying.
Doc Man
Etags increase the size of the HTTP header. If you have expiration dates set on your files then you don’t need to use the Etags
The real concern with ETags is because of the default settings in Apache (and the fact that they don’t really add any value for static content). Apache includes server-specific information in the hash so if you are running a multi-server web farm the ETags will fail to match if you’re using the default Apache config. For most resources a simple Expires header works better anyway so it’s recommended that you disable ETags unless you know that you really need them.
What a CDN does to speed things up is it moves your web server close to the end users (effectively). Most web content is limited by the latency for each request (orange and green bars in the waterfalls) and that is largely limited by the speed of light through fiber from the user’s computer to your web server. The only way to lower the latency is to physically locate your web servers close to all of your users (or figure out faster-than-light transmission).
If all of your users are in a single region (like the UK) then it’s easy, just make sure your web server is in the same region. If your users are spread further apart then it’s quite a bit more difficult. You need servers in regions close to all of your users and you need to figure out how to get each user’s traffic to go to the server closest to them. A CDN will take care of that for you. Most of them generally work as reverse proxies where their servers will accept user requests for your content and they will get it from your server to send to the user (caching it locally so the next time it is asked for they will not have to go back to your server). They also take care of getting all of the users to go to the closest edge node.