I've noticed that our Fastly proxy adds a surprising amount of latency on cache misses (500-1000ms). And, while our overall hit ratio of 80% is pretty good, most misses happen at inopportune times, like loading items from search.
But now that the Neopets CDN supports HTTPS, we can safely switch back to theirs for *most* image loads. (Some features, like downloads and movies, still require CORS headers, which our proxy is still reponsible for adding.)
This forgoes some minor performance wins (like the Download button now requires separate network requests), and some potential filesize reduction opportunities (like Fastly's auto-gzip which we're today using for SVGs, and eventually using their Image Optimizer for assets), to decrease latency. We could still potentially do something more powerful for low-power connections someday… but for now, with the cache miss latency being *so* heavy, this seems like the clear win for almost certainly *all* users today.
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