Question

Andy
So I have this web application placed behind a loadbalancer. When a user requests a webpage such as http://www.example.com/webpage.aspx
the page has a image located at the url http://www.example.com/image/myimage.jpg. The loadbalancer intercepts the url and splits the ursl so it redirects the image part /image/myimage.jpg to
my contentserver and retrieved the image part from my content servers, and the webpage.aspx from the IIS server.
So far so good.
I’m now implementering a secondary site at http://secondary.example.com/webpage2.aspx. Now, here I requests the images from http://www.example.com/image/myimage.jpg.
I guess that this is a bad idea since i do believe that this gives me additional overhead when every external users request pages that has images that is linked from my primary site.

My questions are:

1. How can I find out how much overhead this gives?
2. What would be the recommended way to solve this without resolving to external CDNs?
3. Should i implement the solution from the primamry site on the secondary?

Anyone with similar challenges that have been solved?

/Andy

Answer 1

If your not going to use a CDN, which I recommend, then create a single url for images:

http://images.domain.com/images...etc

Have all your sites use this url, that way browsers can cache the image once no matter how many sites you stand up that use those images.