What is the fastest way(/make loading faster) to serve images and other static content on a site?

Question

Ours is an e-commerce site with lots of images and flash(same heavy flash rendered across all pages). All the static content is stored and served up from the webserver(IHS clustered-2 nodes). We still notice that the image delivery is slow. Is this approach correct at all? What are the alternative ways of doing this, like maybe serving up images using a third party vendor or implementing some kind of caching? P.S. All our pages are https. Could this be a reason?

Edit1: The images are served up from https too so the alerts are a non issue?

Edit2: The loading is slower on IE and most of our users are IE. I am not sure if browser specific styling could be causing the slower IE loading?(We have some browser specific styling for IE)

Answer 1

While serving pages over HTTP may be faster (though I doubt https is not monstrously slow, for small files), a good lot of browsers will complain if included resources such as images and JS are not on https:// URL's. This will give your customers annoying popup notifications.

There are high-performance servers for static file serving, but unless your SSL certificate works for multiple subdomains, there are a variety of complications. Putting the high-performance server in front of your dynamic content server and reverse proxying might be an option, if that server can do the SSL negotiation. For unix platforms, Nginx is pretty highly liked for its reverse proxying and static file serving. Proxy-cache setups like Squid may be an option too.

Serving static content on a cloud like amazon is an option, and some of the cloud providers let you use https as well, as long as you are fine with using a subdomain of their domain name (due to technical limitations in SSL)

Answer 2

You could create a CDN. If your site uses HTTPS, you'll need a HTTPS domain too (otherwise you might get a non-secure items warning).

Also, if your site uses cookies (and most do), having a CDN on a different domain (or if you use www.example.com, on cdn.example.com) you could host them there and not have the cookie data in the HTTP request come in.