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Currently, I am loading the image for my website from a google cloud storage bucket.

I was under the impression that a multi-regional google cloud storage bucket should be one of the fastest way on the internet to load images.

However, this doesn't seem to be the case when I compare the waterfall between my website on a competitors image load time is leagues better than mine.

Is there anything I can do to improve the Google Cloud Storage Images load time?

(My Website URL Aelieve.com)

My Website Load Time/Waterfall

enter image description here

Competitions Load Time (Competitions URL Mopro.com)

enter image description here

Wizard
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1 Answers1

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As explained in this question, GCS is not a CDN. It makes sense that a CDN would serve the content much faster, specially depending where are you doing the request from.

To improve your performance, integrate your GCS bucket with Cloud CDN following this steps.

Also, if you know how to use GAE, take a look at the images API, as it's an API specifically designed to make it easier to handle the serving of static images (including the usage of a CDN and other optimizations).

Jofre
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  • really appreciate this huge help. – Wizard Apr 07 '18 at 20:03
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    It appears this answer is wrong - as Google states "Cloud Storage essentially works as a content delivery network. This does not require any special configuration because by default any publicly readable object is cached in the global Cloud Storage network." in: https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/flexible/java/serving-static-files – Ronen Rabinovici Oct 05 '20 at 00:40
  • It "works as", but it does not have the same performance. I don't think "the global Cloud Storage network" is the same as the edge network used by Cloud CDN. This is what a Google engineer explained in [this answer](https://stackoverflow.com/a/39850663). And the question here already shows stats explaining that difference in performance. If you think that the documentation you linked can be improved to clarify, you can always provide feedback on it (top right corner on that page). – Jofre Oct 05 '20 at 10:03
  • Uh... then, @Jofre, Google will be losing a lot of market because of it. Check for instance AWS S3, it serves as CDN, the same happens with Azure Storage Blob/Files, these also works as CDN and the performance is high. – Néstor Oct 14 '20 at 21:15
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    @Néstor I don't think S3 work as CDN, AWS Cloudfront work as CDN. In fact S3 provides option to accelerated transfer (need extra $), which means it's not very fast for normal use. – Walty Yeung Apr 21 '22 at 07:25