1

Using IIS6 on win2003, if I have an image server is it more efficient to serve up images as http than https? Also is it possible to serve up images as http on a webpage than is https.

Like if this html file: Secure.html is on a server that forces https to be used, but inside https://www.myultrahighsecurewebsite.com/Secure.html/

and I have a image like so:

<img src="http://www.notsosecureatall.com/imagecode/serveupanimage.aspx?id=1&auth=1" />

Is this a good way to serve up images? Is there a better way? Also I wanted to have a defacto site to serve up images so I don't have to push images as well as code and markup between development and live. Should the images or certain type of images like tiff, png, svg, etc... be on https vs http or does it matter?

If I do implement an image server or a page dedicated to keeping track of images, I just want an easy system to push images from development to my production environment without getting snagged on installation problems. But also not having to worry about customers having access to images until a version has been properly approved.

RetroCoder
  • 2,597
  • 10
  • 52
  • 81
  • Why not just reference a static image? src="http://foo/image.jpg" ? – jglouie Jun 28 '12 at 18:44
  • Already doing this, but looking for options with regard to speed and tracking changes to our images for legal purposes. We need to have images dated and have a reference to when images were approved to go into production. But TFS and CVS seem to be allowing for this to a certain extent, but we have non developers that need to be in the loop and TFS and CVS are considered to complicated for non-developers. – RetroCoder Jun 29 '12 at 17:38

1 Answers1

2

It will be more efficient from a CPU (client & server) and network point of view to use plain old HTTP. You'll avoid the overhead of TLS traffic and encryption/decryption of data.

The scenario (mixed HTTP/HTTPS) you present will often annoy a user though. You'll get a warning similar to "This page has unsecured content" (this is getting at the HTTP-only images).

See Loading http content on https website for more info (and additional gotchas) on the previous paragraph.

Are you sure that you need to worry about efficient loading of images? Don't overengineer this. Please share some more details if you've noticed that this is a problem.

Community
  • 1
  • 1
jglouie
  • 12,523
  • 6
  • 48
  • 65