Leveraging community data - Part 2 (9)
So, time to put things on a CDN - but which to pick? They all boast to have the best performance in every country. Some don't reveal network maps. Others do but these don't reveal the full story, or you find half of them all have PoPs in the country in question.
Is there a StatCounter for CDNs? Damn straight. Let me reveal a gold nugget for you. You can get real user monitoring (RUM), similar to what Pingdom and NewRelic supply, and real user CDN measurements - FREE. Yup, you heard right. Stop listening to friends, associates and forum members about CDN speeds. Look at real data coming from real users across the planet.
Introducing: Cedexis.
Long story short they deal with DNS-level load balancing. However, they are big time into community data.
How this works: you install a "radar" javascript tag on your pages. It monitors the page load speeds of your visitors (RUM). After a set number of seconds that tag also tests CDNs. For example, 3 s after page load, the user's browser downloads a test file from a CDN in the background to measure response time and throughput. This does not impact your page load speed.
This data is sent to Cedexis > they build up data on how fast CDNs are for different users in different countries. This data can be broken down at the country and network (carrier) level. We can look at CDN availability (do some CDNs suffer from outages in some countries?), response time and throughput.
Note that this is community data so some countries don't have as much detail available as others. With time this will improve. 40% of the data seems to come from France - WTF! They must have some high volume sites running the tag that's for sure. But if you are running campaigns there then all the better.
Bonus: we can do this for mobile traffic as well! This could be quite useful data especially for countries with poorly developed infrastructure where peering of a specific carrier with a CDN PoP may make a world of difference. For example, below I can see the Cloudfront response times for French users by carrier used. Beginning to see how much insight we have here?
Full image - http://i.imgur.com/ojBcENq.png
If you want to know more about the true power of Cedexis then PM me, it has huge potential for many reasons but it will cost you (talking minimum $250/month for most basic load balancing).
I digress. Show me how to get my hands on this juicy data!
1. Go to https://portal.cedexis.com/public/signup.html and make an account.
2. Once you log in go to Radar tag and copy/paste this into your landers just before the </body> tag
3. Go to configure radar and use the settings as below. Note that you want to turn off private measurements - these are a premium service.
4. Go to Platforms > Add platform button > CDN
5.Use settings as below. Do this for every CDN you want - it makes it easier to compare them later. Just leave out ones you've never heard of.
6. Click on the Charts tab to get to the community portal. This is where the magic happens.
7. For RUM data on page load speed hit Page Load Time > Detailed Charts. Here you can see a breakdown of your page load speeds for each URL, geographic location, browser, OS, and even browser version! You may also be able to see network-level information but I can't - perhaps you need a lot more measurements.
Full image - http://i.imgur.com/n5ToalF.png
8.Go to Radar > Performance Benchmark - Detailed Charts. This is where we see how CDNs fair across the globe. Make sure to select Entire Radar Community as the data source. Your previously added CDN platforms will be present in the list and you can tick them to display the data in the graph.
Filter as you want, gather insights like never before. Below is a graph showing the 50th percentile HTTP coldstart times for several CDNs as tested by US users with Comcast Cable. Look like MaxCDN and Cloudfront kicked ass in this comparison!
Full Image - http://i.imgur.com/O7vVT3T.png
I should note one final point, which is very important. This community data and RUM is provided quid pro quo - you have the radar tag installed so that you contribute to the community data and Cedexis in return gives you the free RUM and access to the community portal. If you choose to remove the radar tag and don't contribute, don't expect to have access indefinitely. Be a team player.
That's about it - there is a lot more that Cedexis can do but that's outside the scope of this tutorial. Any questions? You know how to hit the reply button.
Hahah fuck Zeno thank you for that. Pure next level.
This is amazing, never heard of it before.
Will put on some of my landers and report back.
Awesome stuff - extremely useful!
To summarise these guys in a nutshell, imagine having cdn.yourdomain.com CNAME'd to their load balancing servers (which are globally distributed as you'd expect). Load images in a page as cdn.yourdomain.com/image.jpg. At the DNS-level, their systems route that traffic to any CDN you have connected to your account and you can configure it so that it chooses the CDN with the best known performance for users in that country/location, based on historic data of other users from that location. It basically leverages community data to make your site as fast as possible under all circumstances. Pretty cool.
For simple lander applications you can't really beat that with things like 'dynamic web acceleration', because the limiting factor will often end up being the location of the CDNs PoPs. The only downside is that the really high performance CDNs (I would group Akamai G/R and CDNetworks into this) are cost prohibitive so load balancing between them would be cost prohibitive.
You can of course do this pretty easily with e.g. CloudFront, MaxCDN, CDN77, Fastly, CloudFlare, etc. They don't currently have Rackspace Cloudfiles as a community platform (they use a select set of Akamai PoPs) but they mentioned adding it.
Actually you dont need to install their radar i jus found that they offer the CDN data without the need for registration. Here http://www.cedexis.com/reports/#?rep...ime&country=US
Those are indeed quite nice reports!
Though they are not as detailed and only for the last day or so.
Thanks,zeno.
Nice!
Now I'll know that if I see this script while spying, it's one of Zeno's landers 
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