[zarg]

Main negative would be that it will give a free pass to malware, so be really wary of what APK you install after rooting.

[zarg]

Well, you should be able to buy several devices for the price of a more expensive one.

As to whether they will work for you, there is a bit of gamble. Of my three Chinese tablets (2 Chuwi, and 1 Cube), all still work, they are between 4 and 1 year old.

Main issue IME is that performance and battery life are not very good, hey are “good enough”. The build looks fragile, but then again, if you drop even an expensive tablet it can still break, and after years of being lugged around, they are still working, so creaky plastic may not be so bad after all, hehe.

Upside of being cheap is that you are not overly worried about breaking, losing or getting one stolen. You can really take them whenever and wherever you need them. When the iPad leaves home, f.i. it’s always “with care” and “when really needed”. By contrast my Chuwi Hi8 tablet or Cube 2-in-1 leave home on a whim, whenever they have any potential use, and with less protection, so they end up smaller and lighter to carry.

[zarg]

About cloudflare chaching for zip, it’s not active by default in the free plan, but can be enabled, assuming you have not used your 3 page rules yet, add a rule for .zip extension, the filter will be something like

http://techtablets.com/*.zip

Set the “custom caching” field to “cache everything”, if you are not sure how to set your server headers for caching, just force value in the “Edge cache expire TTL” and “Browser cache expire TTL”, you can set huge values if you want to maximize the cache (and in case you messed up an upload, just upload it under a different name so there will be no side effects from caching)

Apply the rule, wait a couple minutes, try downloading a zip in Chrome, in the dev tools, network tab, check the response headers, you should see a “cf-ray” field, then try to download again the same zip, and check the header, this time there should be a “cf-cache-status:HIT” header, which indicates that the file was served from the cloudflare cache CDN and not your server.

[zarg]

Also the Epxires header is incorrect or not set:

Expires: Wed, 11 Jan 1984 05:00:00 GMT

[zarg]

Chris G wrote:

@zarg Yes we are using cloudflare for caching the site. But they don’t cache downloads, at least not the free plan.

The free plan should cache them just fine, but your server  is configured incorrectly, f.i. when downloading  “Air 3G Updated WLAN And BT Drivers Nov 2014″ the response comes back with the following headers in the response:

Cache-Control: no-cache, must-revalidate, max-age=0
Pragma: no-cache

Which of course disables all caching 🙂

[zarg]

You may also want to use a CDN, this would get you geo-located CDN caching, which will cut down your bandwidth requirement and speed up downloads.

The free tier from CloudFlare should be enough, they should cache pretty much all your download files under 512 MB, meaning that even if a file is downloaded 1000 times, your server may see only a dozen of requests. You could also get free https support through them as well.

[zarg]

Thanks! Worked like a charm

[Author]

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