SSL - better on one domain, or sub-domain CDN?

Hi,

I’m having a bit of fun and games here.We introduced SSL to our site, to get better SEO with Google, and also trust with buyers. However, its had a really negative effect on the speed of the site. The image attached, is how the site looks in Firebug. This is a reload (not forced reload), so this is about as fast as it gets:

For some reason, its hanging for AGES on the SSL certificate part. So my question really - how can I speed it up? I’ve optimised my script as much as I can (that only takes 200ms to process)… but the part where its grabbing the page, takes ages - 400ms just to connect.

ATM we have it setup as:

http://cdn.steampunkjunkies.net - this holds the images on (including images found in the CSS files)

The CSS and JS files themselves are served from the http://steampunkjunkies.net domain (not another subdomain)

Is it actually going to be more efficient to loose the cdn. subdomain, and serve it all from the main one? (as it means it only needs to lookup one SSL certificate then)

Oh, and FWIW - the server load is minimal. The RAM isn’t quite as high as I’d hope - with 4Gb - but for a site only getting small amounts of traffic, it really shouldn’t be that which is causing the slowdown.

Any feedback would be much appreciated.

Cheers

Andy

Ok, well I think its safe to say its worth leaving the images on the cdn. subdomain. I just did a test, and the with it ALL on the main domain, it takes 6 seconds on a forced reload. With the cdn sub-domain for images, it knocks off about 1.5 seconds.

So the biggie still, is the speed of the SSL lookup itself. Anyone got any tips? I’ve contacted my host as well, to see if they’ve got any suggestions too.

TIA

Andy

This topic was automatically closed 91 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.