Running guest cache from a CDN?

[tavenger5]

I've noticed that there are literally millions of files being created in the guest file cache. I was wondering if it would be worth serving these files off of a CDN to save a bit of bandwidth on the web server. Would there be an easy way to do this?

I'm currently using a MAX CDN bucket. I don't need to upload the guest cache files to the CDN, since it's a mirror, but that would a extra nice feature to have instead of just mirroring everything.

[vBET]

Please note that Guest cache serves full cached files only to users who are not logged in. So before such file is streamed first we have to recognize does user is logged in in real system. Also you need to make sure that all generated files are coming to additional one. Please note that for important pages by default cache time to live is just 1 hour. And in case if you recognize that some page is cached then you have to redirect there in some internal way (cannot be by browser, otherwise Google will go crazy) instead of streaming from real forum. so there can be some issues. Especially that vBET recognizes does cache is actual by file metadata, so it is assumed that file exists in local file system right now (still it could be empty file just to keep metadata).

I do not know details of CDN - can you provide link to page with additional info about it? At this moment I have no enought knowledge to tell exactly how to do it.

[tavenger5]

The CDN I use is here: CDN - Content Delivery Network Services by MaxCDN

[vBET]

As I see this is for static content. Guest cache is not static:
1. It is used only for guests
2. It is refreshed quite often (by default once per hour)

I suggest to ask question to MaxCDN about limitations and possibility to use it in such case.

[tavenger5]

Their service can be used like a file depository, the mechanism just has to be there to upload and download from their 'drive'. Something like Amazon s3 may be a better option for this since it necessarily doesn't have to be distributed to different servers. I think the main thing is that the guest cache takes up so much space on my server that it's becoming more expensive to backup everything. Just the Russian folder was 23GB before I cleaned it.

[vBET]

You can omit cache directory during backup or disable Guest Cache for some pages. Something for something - you use more hard drive (which is cheap) and thanks that less memory and CPU. Guest cache caches full html output - that is why it is expensive in hard drive space, and that is why it is so great for your CPU and memory.

About storing it in outside server - we do not support it right now. We can help giving hints about how it works now and where to look, if you want to do modification.

[tavenger5]

I guess the main reason for wanting to store things on a CDN is speed (the server will be closer to the user), and when files like that are stored in my file system they go to the backup drives, which can get expensive, especially when you are storing gigs of files that you don't need to backup.

[tavenger5]

fyi before I started deleting the cache folders my vbet_guestcache folder was over 280G. That's a LOT of space for one application to be taking up. Not to mention I only have 10 translations enabled.