assets are being fetched twice from different hosts

[thescientist13]

Type of Change

• New Feature Request
• Documentation / Website
• Improvement / Suggestion
• Bug
• Other (please clarify below)

Summary

Images are being fetched twice, once from assets/* and another call from CloudFront (Netlify).

Details

Could just be a Netlify setting?

But ideally, we would want these images served from a CDN though... wonder if we can get the best of both worlds? 🤔

[thescientist13]

Seems to be happening with fonts too as part of #402, which loads fonts from /assets/

[thescientist13]

@hutchgrant / @aholtzman
I was just checking in on this, but it looks like it's only happening for me in branch preview environments. If I'm reviewing a PR, I will see the request from both assets/ and CloudFront.

But on production website, the font only loads from CloudFront? Not sure if either of you can confirm.

nm: looks like it is happening now that I am looking. oh well. 🤷‍♂️

---

On a related note, I wonder if we should benchmark with and without Netlify asset optimization? I wonder if it would be better to make sure Greenwood is doing that all on its own, so it either doens't conflict with what Netlify is trying to do, or unintentionally gets a boost that makes it seem to only work better on Netlify. (e.g. false positive).

Thoughts?

[hutchgrant]

I'd like to see the difference with and without optimization. Why don't you turn it off and recompile site and test both(I don't have access to greenwood's netlify). I know, testing production is bad. For 5 minutes, it shouldn't be that big a deal.

[thescientist13]

OK, disabled this all completely in prod and rebuilt and cleared the site cache via Netlify

And things are looking much better! Less requests / payload size overall (as expected) with no more CloudFront urls.

Found this thread where others reported similar issues but I'm pretty sure Netlify already serves everything off of a CDN anyway so losing the CloudFront specific routes shouldn't be a big deal anyway, and our score definitely didn't get harmed, so I say this is a winner.

I think I'll create a PR to add a netlify.toml for this and other settings, so we can track stuff like this and #331 via code.

[thescientist13]

We should definitely look into font / image preloading though, I think that would be super helpful to have a solution / best practice for.

[hutchgrant]

can we close this issue then. Loading seems smoother.

[thescientist13]

Shortly, will make some notes in our guides and introduce a netlify.toml first. Doing that now.