Laurent @ Séminaire

Du dév web au séminaire de Paris

6-min read

What is the best CDN for your assets?

Based on the idea that loading assets that are already cached on user browser is the fastest, we, at Villa-Finder.com, switched from our localy-Grunt-generated-minified-uglified-jQuery-Bootstrap (“lGgmujB”?) file to multiple separated request to popular CDN.

TL;DR: Just don’t use MaxCDN (the default one for jQuery and Bootstrap), they’re super slow compared to other one. As you want to only use one CDN, CloudFlare is the one that offer more choice for the best performances. Is it better to keep it’s own compressed version of assets on CloudFront ? How could I check if my visitors already know the files I tell them to GET from CDN ? I don’t know !

After looking around, I’ve decided the largest CDN available would be:

And that I should test them.

Huge differences on local tests

Let’s start with web inspector

After a Shift +  + R, here are the results (tested with 4G in a Singaporean bus) for some libraries: (Transfered and Size are in KB, Tests are in ms, tests 1 & 2 are fresh load)

jQuery Transfered Size Test 1 Test 2 Test 3 Test 4
Microsoft 36.87 82.40 99 67 55 33
Cloudflare 29.11 82.40 45 188 28 27
Google 28.86 82.40 235 243 30 85
MaxCDN 33.61 82.37 630 708 216 201
Bootstrap css Transfered Size Test 1 Test 2 Test 3 Test 4
Microsoft 19.74 119.67 181 190 123 119
Cloudflare 27.17 119.67 132 68 11 33
MaxCDN 24.74 119.67 694 750 657 683

It’s really bad for MaxCDN! In fact a simple ping show us the problem.

Something’s wrong even on a ping

ping maxcdn.bootstrapcdn.com
--- bootstrapcdn.jdorfman.netdna-cdn.com ping statistics ---
6 packets transmitted, 6 packets received, 0.0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 236.934/266.647/338.548/35.002 ms

ping cdnjs.cloudflare.com
--- cdnjs.cloudflare.com ping statistics ---
6 packets transmitted, 6 packets received, 0.0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 8.054/13.970/17.638/3.753 ms

ping ajax.aspnetcdn.com
--- cs1.wpc.v0cdn.net ping statistics ---
6 packets transmitted, 6 packets received, 0.0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 48.221/56.626/64.773/5.831 ms

More hits with ApacheBench

And I’ve been nice with only 20 hits in one minute, i.e. ab -S -n 20 -c 1 :

Server MaxCDN Cloudflare Microsoft
Server Software NetDNA-cache/2.2 cloudflare-nginx ECAcc
Time taken for tests in seconds 33.6 2.2 5.6
Requests per second 0.59 8.91 3.58
Time per request in ms 1 682 112 279
Transfer rate [Kbytes/sec] 71 1 068 430

Using WebPageTest to check elsewhere

And we discover here that CloudFlare is the only one that makes only one SSL Negotiation.

Sorry, I didn’t found an easy way to present these data ¯\(ツ)/¯

At least, I reduced the filenames :

Paris Duration DNS Lookup Connection SSL Negotiation (ms) TTFB Download Weight
MS1 545 190 34 136 124 61 45.2
MS2 628 249 31 139 188 21 17.1
MS3 491 199 32 137 78 45 83.4
M1 482 0 172 98 179 33 52.5
M2 5561 305 37 93 5125 1 12
M3 813 431 35 90 226 31 69
M4 713 416 37 88 170 2 7.2
C1 643 - - - 444 199 60.1
C2 642 - - - 640 2 14
C3 1261 584 88 147 132 310 20.2
C4 445 - - - 444 1 6.5
G1 1917 1470 109 173 90 75 45.8
San Francisco Duration DNS Lookup Connection SSL Negotiation (ms) TTFB Download Weight
MS1 729 32 29 66 122 480 28
MS2 352 - 52 155 44 101 37.9
MS3 1192 - - - 101 1091 36.6
M1 1163 57 141 63 133 769 33.6
M2 435 - - - 434 1 12.1
M3 467 - 31 68 367 1 7.5
M4 521 37 31 65 375 13 25.6
C1 472 - - - 469 3 0.4
C2 653 - - - 630 23 0.4
C3 617 - - - 551 66 0.4
C4 624 35 29 90 251 219 19.7
G1 1399 56 164 166 120 893 28.9
Singapore Duration DNS Lookup Connection SSL Negotiation (ms) TTFB Download Weight
MS1 722 277 32 286 86 41 28
MS2 983 - 32 284 127 540 37.8
MS3 904 - 33 284 161 426 13.5
M1 2725 73 247 334 287 1784 33.6
M2 826 - 248 312 264 2 12.3
M3 807 - 247 297 261 2 7.5
M4 1048 266 247 292 229 14 25.6
C1 489 - - - 341 148 0.4
C2 503 - - - 495 8 0.4
C3 297 - - - 290 7 0.4
C4 744 279 31 184 97 153 19.7
G1 459 71 35 256 50 47 28.9
               
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