Forum photos/images now load faster (much)

Post by **matthew1** » 11 Nov 2025, 22:06

I made a change to how images are served here at MVS. I'm proud of this, so I'm doing a little victory lap. Images are now cached at the "edge" of Cloudflare's system, so if you're in Tokyo, Paris, Newark, Dar es Salaam, wherever... you'll get the image from a CF server near you. Before, every request for a forum image came from the MVS server. Now the first request from anyone anywhere will come from the MVS server, but every additional request for that image will come from an "edge" server close to wherever you are.

If you didn't know, distance does matter. The MVS server is in NYC. When you load a page here it comes from there. The farther away you are from NYC, the longer it takes for the page to load. Cloudflare has 330 edge server locations around the world.

So these forum images are now cached at a closer location to you now, unless you're already very close to NYC. It's a smart system, so it'll generally use the closest edge server to you to serve any given image.

Cloudflare is a service I've used for MVS for about ten years. It sits between the MVS server and you and speeds things up, stops attacks and general BS, and does other helpful utilities.

If you know a little about the internet, you might be wondering why didn't I just press the CACHE EVERYTHING button ten years ago and take a nap. I could have done that, but then the forum threads/posts wouldn't update. They'd still be stuck at 2015! (or whatever cache interval I'd have set before my nap) So the images are a bit of a carve out from that. The trick is to cache as much as I can, but not forum posts themselves.

Real example download/file.php?id=95599&t=1 I used for testing before and after this change:

before 332 ms
after 38 ms

That's a magnitude, dude.

dikidera · Post by **dikidera** » 12 Nov 2025, 00:32

Ok, but there are other caching issues, too aggressive.

Post by **matthew1** » 12 Nov 2025, 10:10

Dikidera, are you getting stale pages?

dikidera · Post by **dikidera** » 12 Nov 2025, 13:29

Yes, for the past 1 year and these days I am also seeing other people's accounts appear as my own as if I am logged into theirs. I can also see people's inbox.

Post by **matthew1** » 12 Nov 2025, 13:38

[edited]

Let's find a fix for it here viewtopic.php?p=661411#p661411