URL masking causing lagging.

jerrylouise

Hey i am using some php code to mask urls from s3 so users can't see the files are coming from there but it is causing such a large amount of lag if you try to visit other pages at the same time.

I'll post my code and hopefully there is a better method perhaps or a solution to the slowdown(to the point other pages error out).

The rewrite

	function videofile()
	{
		//echo S3PATH.'video_gallery/'.$video['cat_ID'].'/'.$video['video'];
		if(isset($_SESSION['member']))
		{
			$filename = $this->uri->segment(4);
			$cat_id = $this->uri->segment(3);
			$img = $this->images->imageID();
			$ref = '/photos/'.$cat.'/view/';
				header("video/x-flv");
				unset($url);
				$url = "http://s3.amazonaws.com/mysite/video_gallery/".$cat_id."/".$filename;
				readfile($url);
		}
		else
		{
			redirect('/');
		}
	}

The file

<object id="player" classid="clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000" name="player" width="<?php echo $player_width; ?>" height="<?php echo $player_height; ?>">
	<param name="movie" value="<?php echo base_url();?>movies/player.swf" />
	<param name="allowfullscreen" value="true" />
	<param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always" />
	<param name="flashvars" value="file=<?php echo site_url() ?>gallery/videofile/<?php echo $video['cat_ID']?>/<?php echo $video['video']?>&amp;image=<?php echo site_url() ?>gallery/videoimage/<?php echo $video['thumb'] ?>" />
	<embed
		type="application/x-shockwave-flash"
		id="player2"
		name="player2"
		src="<?php echo base_url();?>movies/player.swf"
		width="<?php echo $player_width; ?>"
		height="<?php echo $player_height; ?>"
		allowscriptaccess="always"
		allowfullscreen="true"
		flashvars="file=<?php echo site_url() ?>gallery/videofile/<?php echo $video['cat_ID']?>/<?php echo $video['video']?>&amp;image=<?php echo site_url() ?>gallery/videoimage/<?php echo $video['thumb'] ?>" />
</object>
<?php
/* SWF OBJECT METHOD - IE6 BUGS
<script type="text/javascript">
	var flashvars = {
	  'file':               'video.flv',
	  'autostart':          'false'
	};

var params = {
  'allowfullscreen':    'true',
  'allowscriptaccess':  'always',
  'bgcolor':            '#ffffff'
};
var attributes = {};
swfobject.embedSWF("/movies/player.swf", "flashContent", "600", "450", "9.0.0", "/movies/expressInstall.swf", flashvars, params, attributes);
</script>

<div id="flashContent" class="clearfix">
	<a href="http://www.adobe.com/go/getflashplayer">
		<img src="http://www.adobe.com/images/shared/download_buttons/get_flash_player.gif" alt="Get Adobe Flash player" />
	</a>
</div>*/
?>

sneakyimp

You're defeating the whole point of using a content delivery network like S3 because you are forcing all the files hosted on S3 to be first downloaded by your server and then fed to your client from your webserver. That's pointless really and is probably the reason it's really slow. People are not downloading files from S3 which is fast, they are downloading it from your server which has to go through the extra work of contacting S3, requesting the file, and then relaying it byte-by-byte thru PHP/Apache/etc. until it reaches the end user.

You should look into creating a domain or subdomain which fronts for S3. I'm not sure if/how that is possible, but the approach you are using is a bad idea.

jerrylouise

I got the feeling it was a bad idea however the client does not want anyone having access to the S3 files.

sneakyimp

In that case what you are doing is probably necessary, but it will only make it slower to host the files on S3 unless maybe your server runs on Amazon's cloud servers (EC2) and you use some kind of blob data service.

Ever done any EC2? Google App Engine might also work. The basic idea is that both your code and your files would exist in the amazon cloud so your server's access to the data would be faster. I can't guarantee this would work but it might.

Another possibility is that you could maybe set up some crossdomain stuff -- or maybe build your SWF files so they ONLY talk to your machine.

OR...and this might sound crazy. You might encode your SWF files somehow (like Base64 encode their contents and save them to a txt file somewhere) then have your main SWF fetch the txt file contents and base64 decode them then case the resulting ByteArrays as a MovieClip. No idea if this will work but AS3 is pretty cool with binary data.

Even with your current code, any programmer worth their salt will be able to grab the SWF files once they've established a session. You could use curl to do it in PHP. Or you might even be able to peek in the browser cache. I realize it's futile to have a rational discuss sometimes. The best you can do is make it inconvenient for someone so it's harder to figure out.

sneakyimp

I wasn't very clear before. What I meant to say is that Amazon AWS has things like Simple Db which may or may not be faster than you current solution because the swf files would be stored as data in the db and might be more quickly accessible to your app IF your app is running on EC2.

sneakyimp

OH...and other thing might be possible. S3 supports file permissions...I tend to doubt that it supports them to the degree that you'd be able to create a username and password for each and every one of your members, but that also might work.

sneakyimp

AWS has announced bucket policies. Maybe that'll help?