Hosting YUI Files for Implementations in Mainland China

Blog
About

Hosting YUI Files for Implementations in Mainland China

January 15, 2008 at 8:54 am by Eric Miraglia | In Development, Performance |

Back in February 2007, we opened up hosting of YUI files on Yahoo’s content delivery network to all users, and we maintain a page describing how you can implement YUI while drawing all of its resources from our network. What we’ve heard from the YUI community is that having this choice is a big deal — and more than a billion YUI files were served from our yui.yahooapis.com last week, a number that has grown steadily since we opened up that service.

The yui.yahooapis.com domain is an edge-hosted CDN, and it automatically draws files from data centers as close as possible to the source of the request, optimizing performance. While that works well in most locations, one area where we were seeing poor response times was in China, where a growing community of YUI users is located. To help improve performance for implementers serving the China market, we’re announcing today the availability of cn.yui.yahooapis.com, a CDN specifically for that region.

As of today, the following two paths will both work for retrieving the minified Yahoo Global Object:

http://cn.yui.yahooapis.com/2.4.1/build/yahoo/yahoo-min.js (China region)
http://yui.yahooapis.com/2.4.1/build/yahoo/yahoo-min.js (standard, global usage)

For most implementations, you’ll want to continue using the standard yui.yahooapis.com, but if your project serves China primarily the new domain will improve your response times and deliver a better experience. For users in mainland China, we’ve seen as much as a 5x improvement in response times based on initial tests.

A bit more about this (in Chinese) on YUIBlog.cn, a blog created recently by the user experience team at Yahoo! China (a company in the Alibaba group). A big thanks to Hongwei Zeng, an engineer at Yahoo! China, for helping to make this arrangement possible.

Share and extend: Bookmark with Yahoo! My Web | Bookmark with del.icio.us | digg it! | reddit!

2 Comments »

RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI

Will you ever allow us to use a CNAME entry to the yahooapis.com domain? Similar to the way feedburner mybrand works. eg yui.mydomain.com

Comment by John — January 15, 2008 #
@John — At present, we’re not planning to do this. Because the address of the files is not user-facing in a significant way, and because the current approach does allow for some cross-site caching benefit based on the hosted files being in the same place, it strikes me that the benefit outweighs the disadvantages. I can see how it would be nice to get the third-party domain out of one’s code in some cases, but for those where this is really important the option exists to host the files oneself. Regards, -Eric

Comment by Eric Miraglia — January 16, 2008 #

Yahoo! User Interface Blog