Offloading attachments to different fileserver or service like akamai

[Ali_]

Hello everyone,

I've recently had some trouble due to the amount of attachments people upload and download on my site.  It's a educational resource site, so I thought of a few things to optimize things further than the basic tweaks and options that are part of SMF.

Essentially, I'd like to segregate a few aspects of the services running on the server.  The database is easy enough to have on a separate system, but I'm unsure of what to do to have the attachment directory on a different system.  When a lot of people are uploading/downloading, it makes apache really slow in delivering the page as well.  Using NGINX might make things speedier in the short term for two reasons: 1) it's faster in general and 2) you can throttle file downloads (not really short burst ones) to a certain bandwidth.  However, I'd like users to be able to navigate the site without it being affected by file downloads.  So this would entail a separate server to hold file attachments.

The plan is to move away from debian/apache/mysql on one system, and do:

- FreeBSD/PHP/NGINX on one system for the web front end;
- FreeBSD/MySQL on another system for database;
- FreeBSD server with whatever application required (FTP/NGINX/SMB) or something like a CDN (Content delivery network) like Akamai through rackspace/etc...

I'm sure others could benefit from this discussion, although I haven't found any threads dealing with this specific issue.  Any guidance, help, or advice would be greatly appreciated.

[Ali_]

So, just as an alternative way of asking this question:

Is there any way to use a CDN like maxCDN or AmazonS3 to deal with attachments.  Any help would be appreciated.  Please

[Arantor]

It depends. Do you want to prevent guests etc from downloading such files?

If the answer to that question is yes, the answer to your original question will be no. And this reason, so far, is why no-one is particularly interested in implementing attachments served via a CDN or other cloud service.

[zijO]

Would be nice to have attachments saved on Amazon S3.

[Arantor]

If you have lower tier hosting where you run into limits, the odds are you'll run into the same limits trying to send/receive files from S3.