
Torbit – Making Websites Faster - johns
http://jonefox.com/blog/2010/11/16/torbit-making-websites-faster/
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wccrawford
" but many of these are still not done because they’re annoying and tedious to
do and developers are often focused on other things. "

To me, that situation always meant I'd find (or code) a tool to make that
happen automatically. Having the right tools for the job always means things
go better, both for the developer and the client.

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jules
I think Google has a similar tool freely available, although I can't find it
right now. Does anybody know?

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joshfraser
They released an open source apache module called mod_pagespeed. We actually
set up a proxy for it so you can see what it would do to your site without
having to install anything: <http://torbit.com/proxy>

One reason people may prefer a cloud solution is there is no other
infrastructure to set up. It turns out mod_pagespeed is both CPU and cache
intensive which means rolling this out on your servers requires beefing up
your server infrastructure.

We may end up using their technology & contributing to the project at some
point, but right now it's very alpha and breaks a lot of sites (including
Google's own!).

They're also missing most of the browser-specific optimizations that we're
doing, specifically around mobile.

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damoncloudflare
Hi bmelton,

Looks like you were active around the TC Disrupt time, which was very busy for
us (we've added two datacenters since then). We generally make websites about
30% faster on average.

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nphase
You know that you can reply directly to his comment, right?

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bmelton
I can't tell how similar this is to CloudFlare, but it looks close.

That said, CloudFlare actually increased latency by a non-trivial amount,
which caused me to abandon it. It may be better now, or it may have worked
better on much larger sites, but my 256M slice & Django blog was faster
without it.

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joshfraser
The big difference is Torbit's focus on the other front end optimizations
besides moving resources to a CDN. We compress CSS & JavaScript. Reduce HTTP
requests. Optimize images. Preload content. And lots more.

CloudFlare as I understand are focused on being a really good and easy to use
CDN.

And yes, the cloud approach means that we add about 200-300ms to every non-
cacheable request. We think it's a decent trade-off since we usually shave off
10 times that when all our optimizations are applied.

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Mithrandir
So it's SaaS?

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whimsy
Yeah. It looks like it's basically an almost-no-setup proxy kind of thing.

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joshfraser
Exactly

