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New Post: Is Html Compression (gzip) an Option

jao28 — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 13:09:40 GMT

Thanks for the reply Piedone, I have checked and my web host doesn't allow for IIS compression. I don't know if other web host providers do or not, too bad. Do you think it is possible to allow for compression without access to IIS? I have a feeling, from what I have read, that even if I turned it on via web.config that the server will still disallow it unless the host has enabled gzip compression. Just looking for all the ways I can to improve performance.

New Post: Is Html Compression (gzip) an Option

Piedone — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 12:54:50 GMT

This could be something in Combinator but it's also a feature you can enable in IIS directly under Compression.

New Post: Is Html Compression (gzip) an Option

jao28 — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 12:15:30 GMT

I don't know a lot about this part of web development, but I have read a lot about how gzip compression can be useful in decreasing load time. That is about all I know. I was just wondering if this could be a feature introduced with the Combinator module (or if anyone has a process in place for Orchard to utilize gzip)? Hope this question makes sense.

New Post: Absolute URLs and performance

Piedone — Wed, 13 Feb 2013 12:32:53 GMT

Thanks, fixed :-).

New Post: Absolute URLs and performance

AlexPaven — Wed, 13 Feb 2013 09:28:16 GMT

This is not really related, but in ResourceDefinitionExtensions you have this line of code:
return Path.Combine(resource.BasePath + resource.Url);

Did you perhaps mean:
return Path.Combine(resource.BasePath, resource.Url);
?

New Post: Absolute URLs and performance

Piedone — Tue, 12 Feb 2013 14:49:33 GMT

Yes, but since css parsing can have its problems review the produced stylesheet - it can choke on css properties having spaces and being enclosed in quotes.

New Post: Absolute URLs and performance

AlexPaven — Tue, 12 Feb 2013 13:41:39 GMT

Thanks, I'll try out the alpha version - presumably if I don't turn on spriting it will behave much the same as the trunk version?

Anyway, I'm also using the Contrib.MediaFolder module (since I have two balanced web servers) so that might have something to do with it, but other files are served instantly. Also thanks for the hint regarding the static file handler! :)

New Post: Absolute URLs and performance

Piedone — Tue, 12 Feb 2013 13:30:07 GMT

Hi!

Thanks for the great feedback and great to hear you like the module!

First of all, which version are you using? I'd advice you to try out the alpha version from the image-sprites branch. It's reasonably stable and I also have it working on some of my sites. The only issue is that it uses a css parser that's not bullet-proof yet (that's why I haven't released it yet). Also, with that version excluded resources are reference by relative url for me (this what's intended).

Combined resources are static files served from the Media folder. Combinator doesn't intercept combined resource loading in any way. So if you're seeing slow load times for combined files you may see the same for other files served fro the Media folder as well. Take a look at the Web.config in Media if there's anything that could cause this problem. Particularly the <add path="" verb="" type="System.Web.StaticFileHandler" /> line isn't needed and can cause unnecessary overhead if you're above IIS6.

New Post: Absolute URLs and performance

AlexPaven — Tue, 12 Feb 2013 11:55:28 GMT

Hi Piedone, really nice work with this module, but I have a couple of issues with some of the fine details :)

First of all, resources which are excluded from combination seem to generate an absolute url; we noticed that when we accessed the site for the first time from the local IP in a load balanced environment; I fixed that by only passing on the PathAndQuery of the PublicUrl in the Combine method of the CombinatorService, and another couple of small changes brought on by that. Let me know if you'd like me to make a pull request, but that might take quite some time (leaving this job in a couple of days and I might not come back to Orchard for a while).

Second thing is we're noticing small delays when accessing the combined resources - i.e. chrome reports that he's waiting for the resources for hundreds of milliseconds every time (this was also true before I started hacking away at your code by the way :)). Do you have any hints on what I could check to solve this issue? With combinator disabled we're seeing blazing fast access - I'm still trying to trace the problem.

Like I said, the module is brilliant, but if I don't solve the performance problem we'll be forced to disable it... which would be a shame. I'll keep you posted if I find anything!

Alex

New Post: Combinator Module and 404

Piedone — Mon, 26 Nov 2012 06:27:20 GMT

Glad you sorted it out and you like the module :-).

New Post: Combinator Module and 404

RyanKeeter — Mon, 26 Nov 2012 05:32:31 GMT

Okay, Piedone, this is the most bad-ass module I have ever seen. First off, I got it all fixed, and it all came from my site not deploying the Media folder's web.config file (isn't that odd?). Once I added that to the file so that read access could be given to the contents, then everything worked like a charm. Thanks for this fantastic piece of code!

New Post: Combinator Module and 404

Piedone — Sat, 24 Nov 2012 20:21:41 GMT

Is the file there in the Media folder? Are there any Combinator-related entries in the log files?

New Post: Combinator Module and 404

RyanKeeter — Sat, 24 Nov 2012 19:28:37 GMT

So as I understand it, if I put styles in a script block like so:

@{
     Style.Include("site.css")
     Style.Include("jquery-ui.css")
}

Then Combinator will package up these styles and output them into a link like:

http://localhost:16822/Media/Default/Combinator/Styles/-59771834-1.css?timestamp=129982566028348759

However, when I run the site, I get a 404 error (screenshot below). What did I do wrong?

https://roomapp.imgix.net/posts/images/XWpqpwT-q34miPKK-1353784600444-orig.png

New Post: Combined files not being cached on client

Piedone — Sat, 10 Nov 2012 12:56:14 GMT

Thanks for taking the time to write down your findings. I'm happy that in the end you could find a solution. And awaiting your multi-server experiences!

New Post: Combined files not being cached on client

anoordende — Sat, 10 Nov 2012 00:59:03 GMT

It's been a fun-filled few days but I thought a quick update with the solution is on order. After trying various ways of getting IIS to play nice with Web.config, either in the alternative Media location or in the default Media location, turns out that yes with a lot of tinkering it *might* be possible but that would be at the cost of the Media Folder module being "plug & play", e.g. we would have to configure virtual directories or a seperate site from which we can serve the media directly.

Core challenge was that the alternative Media path is orchestrated completely within Orchard and therefore IIS still looks for any media files under the default Media folder, including corresponding Web.config files. An added challenge was that the Media Folder module drops the tenant name, e.g. "Default" from the URL (which is btw a very nice feature!), but the tenant name is still used internally to map to the Media files.

I have created a fork anoordende/clientcache (although changes not yet committed) under the Media Folder project that resolves the issue by re-utilising the clientCache section from the Web.config in the default Media location and by the implementation of an "IMediaClientCache" which can also be overriden by any other module using a priority.

The default implementation of the IMediaClientCache sets the correct Cache-control, LastModified, etc. and returns a 304 as required if the client includes the If-Modified-Since header. A side-effect of this is that we're no longer depending on IIS to monitor UNC files for changes, which can be problematic to set up correctly.

A fantastic side effect for me personally is that all my files stored under media are rewritten to a CDN, therefore in combination with the Combinator Module I get .css and .js served from the CDN thrown in for free. Never seen my sites load so fast. Happy days.

This discussion turned out to be in the wrong place, so I will create a new placeholder under the Media Folder module with a link to here. I will still report back on how I get on with Combinator in my multi server setup.

New Post: Combined files not being cached on client

Piedone — Thu, 08 Nov 2012 08:28:00 GMT

@anoordende: what you build looks very interesting. Combinator is designed to run on multi-server environents without problems and concurrency issues. I'd be very interested how it works out for you (more precisely: even in a multi-node environment Combinator should only process resources once and store them globally accessible if the Media folder and DB is properly shared).

The Orchard Gallery most possible uses an older version of Combinator. Before a few versions Combinator didn't have the browser cache-bashing feature of timestamps in urls.

Also I think your browser should use a cached version of the files by default (I don't know whether there's a specification for that but I've seen this is the common behaviour), even if no cache control headers were set.

New Post: Combined files not being cached on client

TheMonarch — Thu, 08 Nov 2012 01:06:01 GMT

The orchard gallery site is running on Azure, and the file storage provider for Orchard under Azure is blob storage. Blob storage is separate from the Media folder, and doesn't get controlled by the web.config settings for the Media folder (nor by any web.config folder settings in a .NET site that references files in blob storage).

You can set http headers for items in Azure blob storage, but you'll have to write code to do it, see here for an example: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4507657/add-cache-control-and-expires-headers-to-azure-storage-blobs. By default blob stored items have no expires or cache-control headers set, so you are at the mercy of browsers' default logic.

New Post: Combined files not being cached on client

anoordende — Thu, 08 Nov 2012 00:47:57 GMT

Thanks for your comments. I haven't had much of a chance to look into this further, but I will be focussing on the Media Folder module to resolve this. All Web.config etc. are in place. In my situation IE, FF and Chrome all return a 200 and no indication of "from cache" as mentioned.

We are building an interesting setup with load-balanced / failover boxes, quite succesfully, but the devil is in the detail. It now turns out we had the issue of not caching media files before, but this was never really an issue due to all links to media files (other than static files such as css and js) being rewritten to a very well behaved CDN when it comes to cache headers.

I am happy that Combinator is not behind this issue. Though I am still curious why the Orchard Gallery site is not including the timestamp?

New Post: Combined files not being cached on client

Piedone — Wed, 07 Nov 2012 11:32:57 GMT

Good to see you guys figuring it out :-). Combinator is not dealing with cache headers so yes, if you want to set them, you may want to do it from the Web.config.

New Post: Combined files not being cached on client

TheMonarch — Tue, 06 Nov 2012 23:48:26 GMT

I don't get a 304 in chrome dev tools, it shows up as 200, but with "(from cache)" in the "Size" column. The browser knows the max-age hasn't passed yet so it uses the copy from its cache instead of sending an HTTP request. If you are testing caching in the browser make sure you haven't disabled cache.