Cdn hosting

As of MathJax 1.1 we are maintaining a public installation on a Content Delivery Network (CDN) for several reasons:

• Users of software such as Blogger have no server access and thus can't install MathJax themselves. They could, however, point to a publicly hosted version of MathJax.
• By hosting MathJax, we can control versioning and patches carefully, thereby increasing reliability
• Because of both reduced latency and caching, CDN hosting will improve performance for most users
• We can easily collect statistics about pages and sites using the hosted version of MathJax

We recently switched to Rackspace as our CDN service; the service through Amazon CloudFront is still partially available.

Quick Guide to Updating CDN Content

MathJax CDN content is served from the cdn.mathjax.org domain. The source of this data (the CDN origin) is Rackspace Cloud Files (which uses OpenStack) and it is served via Rackspace's CDN partner, Akamai; more information can be found at Rackspace.

The basic set up is that each versioned release on the CDN corresponds to a subdirectory and each of those subdirectories is an independent clone of the corresponding MathJax branch from our canonical GitHub repository (except for 1.0 which is based on the sourceforge repository).

To update CDN content, one merely updates content in the appropriate release directory. The web-interface at Rackspace is not very useful however, so instead Cyberduck has proven to be a reliable tool to handle uploads.

Changes to the CloudFiles container should take ~15 min to take effect.