We've recently moved to Google Cloud Storage from AWS because of http/2. We had a bottleneck of the browser waiting when serving multiple large (8+files * 10mb+each).
I'm wondering if 99designs looked at any sort of domain sharding to get around the timing issues. If I understand correctly, wouldn't this get around the priority queue issue? Your js,fonts, etc. coming from a different address than your larger images, would create completely separate connections.
I'm not completely sure this would get around the issues mentioned, but I'm curious if it was looked at as a solution.
The priority queue isn't the issue. In fact the priority queue is what kept our first paint times tanking because browsers prioritised render blocking resources instead of images.
The issue was due to the variance of image size. An image that is significantly larger than the page average will be loaded slower since all images get an equal share of bandwidth (priority). Adding sharding wouldn't help since the client only has a fixed amount of bandwidth to share and all images would still get the same share of it. Sharding could help if the bandwidth bottle neck was at the CDN but that's rarely going to be the case.
Domain sharding is anti pattern for http2. Reason being for another domain it needs to make an expensive TLS handshake. With http2 on the same domain, it doesn't. We've done tests and even moved away from even having a static domain.
I'm wondering if 99designs looked at any sort of domain sharding to get around the timing issues. If I understand correctly, wouldn't this get around the priority queue issue? Your js,fonts, etc. coming from a different address than your larger images, would create completely separate connections.
I'm not completely sure this would get around the issues mentioned, but I'm curious if it was looked at as a solution.