Hi, this is to let you know that static.opensuse.org, which has been existed for about 9 months, is now properly set up on a separate host which is optimized to handle static small requests. It does use transparent gzip content encoding and a short keepalive timeout. And it sends useful Expire times in the headers so that the stuff can be cached for a while (and not revalidated too often). It can effectively offload other servers, when they link to it, instead of delivering stuff themselves, like CSS files, images, javascript. It is worth taken into account that a typical browser is said to open two parallel connections per Host(name), so it is useful as such to link to different servers instead of just one, to increase parallelity of things downloaded by the browser. If you consider that a typical website has 30-50 included objects, it is useful to *save as many requests as possible*. This should be the highest priority for a good user experience. Keepalive is important to keep the transfer smooth and avoid additional, unnecessary roundtrip times for new connections - because latency is the worst enimy in our today's high speed networks. A roundtrip between Europe and the US can take between .2 and 0.5 seconds. Keepalives help avoiding more latency induced pauses than necessary. For Keepalives to be enabled on a high traffic server, it is needed that it is fast and lean enough so the slots occupied by open (but unused connections) are not too expensive - which is typically the case on a preforked, PHP-bloated seb server. The www.opensuse.org/*.opensuse.org sites hosted in Provo don't use Keepalive at this time, so it comes as a big advantage that static.o.o uses it. In addition, it is much faster to reach from the US, than vice versa (I may write a further mail about that later). static.o.o has a checkout of https://forgesvn1.novell.com/svn/opensuse/trunk/infrastructure and it would be cool if all of you would look into possibilities to link to static.o.o where possible. This should increase performance, and at the same time, it should make some things easier, because we can update and maintain some things in a common place. There's also quite some potential for cleanup and simplification I guess. The clumsy svn externals in the subdirectories of the tree are probably not needed anymore and a simple symlink can suffice. Sites that use static.o.o already: forums.o.o software.o.o build.o.o users.o.o (?) Sites that don't: news.o.o www.o.o / *.o.o (the wiki) lizard.o.o zonker.o.o ichain login page Peter -- Contact: admin@opensuse.org (a.k.a. ftpadmin@suse.com) #opensuse-mirrors on freenode.net Info: http://en.opensuse.org/Mirror_Infrastructure SUSE LINUX Products GmbH Research & Development