journal features

cloud hosting, not lightning fast

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-eight years and a million words

Toronto, 2017.03.01

I did some speed testing and discovered that AWS and Google are slow at serving fonts. I'd had Google hosting the font (Open Sans) used on this website for some years. Using pingdom.com, I determined that loading just that one font was adding about 200ms to my page load time.

So I downloaded the font from Google using localfont.com, and put a modified version of the CSS that that tool produced onto my AWS S3 slice along with the only font file I really use.

This resulted in equal page load times.

Concerned, I put the CSS and a single font file on my site's native server (on linode.com) Now I'm seeing load times of 30ms for the font.

And as a bonus? No mysterious Google .js loads, doubtless tracking my visitors.

rand()m quote

It has always seemed strange to me...The things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling, are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self-interest, are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of the first they love the produce of the second.

—John Steinbeck, Cannery Row