How to speed up website loading for opposite side of planet

Question

I am currently running a small piece of PHP software which is being accessed by two groups of people, one group in China, the other in Ireland. The server is hosted in Ireland, and no doubt pages load between 0.3 and 0.8 seconds.

The Chinese people are recording times of between 3.0 seconds and 10 seconds.

I have run speed tests and the Chinese have an internet connection of 1.5 mbit (testing server in Ireland) and a ping of 750ms.

So far, to improve load time I have redone a lot of the MySQL database interaction to maximize efficiency, but this did not help. I presume this only slightly reduces server process time but has little effect on page download time.

I was thinking, could I get hosting in China, and use this as a gateway for the system in Ireland. Surely the latency and download speed between this Chinese server would be better than the average person.. And the average persons requests would've re-routed through here.

Does this sound at all feasible? Or does anyone else have suggestions in relation to this?

Answer 1

Your biggest problem is the latency. If you can minimize the http requests, you should see large gains.

But, it's probably easier to just the buy services of a content delivery network and move all your static files to them, making sure they have well connected servers in china and ireland. I think this is easier than redesigning your website.

The cheapest bang for the buck would come from sending suitable http headers to indicate to the web browsers that they don't need to constantly check with your servers for freshness validation(don't do conditional http requests). If you can do this for all external webpage objects(images, css, js etc...) then the first page load will still take 10 seconds or whatever, but subsequent page loads should be very close to your irish visitors. THis is just a matter of webserver configuration. Heres a tutorial if needed. To be honest, sending cache friendly headers is always a good idea, this is how you get those snappy responsive websites we all love.