Comments on: Using Amazon’s CloudFront with Rails & Paperclip

By: Michael Hellein

Michael Hellein — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 19:07:14 +0000

Also, if you use rand in the Proc above, you'll be telling browsers to load the same file from different servers on each request, which is obviously not helpful for caching!

By: Michael Hellein

Michael Hellein — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 18:47:51 +0000

I haven't tried using Paperclip with Cloudfront yet, but I was also considering something like Mike Larkin is suggesting to get around the requests-per-domain bottleneck. However, I don't think his approach will work, as the string interpolation should only happen once when the model is loaded. (Or am I mistaken?) Fortunately, :s3_host_alias also takes a Proc, so you could do: :s3_host_alias => Proc.new { "cdn#{rand(4)}.pixellent.com" } I also don't know if I would use rand, because you'd get a more even distribution by repeatedly iterating from 0-n (where n is the number of domains). On some percentage of requests, rand will give us all the same domain, and then we'd have no performance gain!

By: Colin Adams

Colin Adams — Tue, 03 May 2011 00:53:13 +0000

Thanks for this. I was looking for S3 stuff, but the ":default_style => :original" came in handy!

By: Dave Rapin

Dave Rapin — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 16:11:33 +0000

Great writeup, thanks a lot. Especially found the timestamp based on *file* modified date useful for cloudfront.

I'm using this for the next version (still in development) of my open source photographer portfolio (http://grokphoto.org)

By: Scott Carleton

Scott Carleton — Fri, 18 Feb 2011 01:49:55 +0000

Barry,

Thanks for this post. Exactly what I was looking for!

By: Barry

Barry — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 21:32:49 +0000

Mike, I find just using the CDN is fast enough, and I want people's browsers to cache all of my assets. Your approach means they might get a different URL for an asset every time they visit one of my pages, so that I end up paying more for outgoing bandwidth.

By: Mike Larkin

Mike Larkin — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 19:54:02 +0000

Excellent write up! One thing I'd suggest would be to use multiple CNAMEs to serve assets -- most browsers limit simultaneous connections to a subdomain to a max of 2, so if you use something like cnd0, cdn1, cdn2, cdn3, you can speed things up a bit:

:s3_host_alias => "cdn#{rand(4)}.pixellent.com"

By: Barry

Barry — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 18:13:52 +0000

Hello, Cameron. It doesn't work that way. The interpolation is using attachment.instance_read(:updated_at).to_i so it only changes if the file changes, not if anything else on the model changes. The problem you describe only happens if you are relying on Model.updated_at for the interpolation.

By: Cameron Westland

Cameron Westland — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 16:14:15 +0000

Be careful with the updated_at interpolator if you're going to have any other attributes on the model. For instance. If you have :image and :name in the database. If you do Model#update_attribute(:name, "New name") it will update your Interpolation for the attachment. It will not however update the file name on the server so you're path and the actual file will be out of sync.

By: Marco B

Marco B — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 08:33:42 +0000

Thanks for the post.

I know CloudFront has a 24hours delay to refresh its content if you update a file of yours into S3, so the "change name" does the trick (renaming a file is also the only way to be sure that browser don't use a locally cached version).

Nice way to implement this into paperclip, thanks again :)