Speed Up Your Site By Using Sub Domains

sub domains, images, image, sud, domain, folder

[roberthilley]

First, I cannot completely remember the who, what, when why, etc ... but bear with me here:

I AM A BAD LISTENER

I was reading in a PC magazine about some windows hacks ... apparently, when your machine calls a typical website (URL) it uses three connections ... or something like that ... to access the website. The machine can also use another three connections to connect at the same time to hit a different IP for like email, etc. The site downloads to the users machine slow because of the traffic jam that happens when all three of these connections try to access the same URL.

For example, the connections are all trying to access the root folder as well as /images or /html, etc.

SPEED UP YOUR SITE

Now the magazines author claimed that in order to speed up the download speed of your website and allow not one but all three connections to access information at once you should create subdomains for different folders.

One obvious example of this would be to use a subdomain for your images folder ... you would allow for the first three connections to hit yoursite.com and another three to go out to images.yoursite.com and another three to go out to styles.yoursite.com, etc. (not sure about seperating style sheets but it is just and example folder).

I have never tried doing this because it seems like a major pain in the ass to seperate your files into seperate domains but was curious ...

1. Does this theory makes sence to anybody?

2. Has anybody tried this and experienced a positive result?

There may be some confusio on the number of connections your computer uses but you see the point ... please let me know what you guys think.

[monkeythumpa]

I wonder if this has to do with the number of simultaneous downloads your client allows, which is usually two. You could trick the client into downloading two per domain by using subdomains. It could work, try it out and let us know.

[Ardfry]

This is exactly how my site works, and it was designed this way with speed in mind.

I have my html on one web server, and images and downloads on a different server.
If I get swamped with a good review or a mention, then those who visit my site might see some lag for images and/or downloads, but the main site is just as fast as usual since it's only serving small bits of text (the html and css pages).

If you design your site the right way, then you let .htaccess do all the work for you. If you already have all of your images in a seperate directory or directories, just have htacces redirect the requests to the image server and you won't have to change a single line of html code.