What Worked - What Didn't

Mon Sep 17 18:26:40 UTC 2001

At 02:09 PM 9/17/2001 -0400, Daniel Golding wrote:

 >I specified Edgesuite, rather than simply akamizing the links. I think that
 >moving ALL content, rather than just some linked content to distributed
 >servers makes a big difference.

Again, a strictly technical post:

EdgeSuite does serve the entire page, and while it is possible that "moving 
ALL content" might take longer than just moving images, I (personally) 
believe that would perform better than Akamaizing only images during times 
of peak congestion.

EdgeSuite, much like FreeFlow, does not pre-populate servers.  It requests 
content that has been requested of it.  So when a user goes to an 
EdgeSuited site, they are sent to the nearest Akamai server.  That Akamai 
server requests the HTML as well as individual objects, saves them to the 
hard drive, and serves them to the user.  If no user requests a page, it 
will not be fetched.

So the first user may not experience a large performance increase, but they 
might, we have other behind-the-scenes tricks which sometimes 
helps.  Either way, they should not see a performance decrease.  And all 
subsequent users should see a substantial performance increase.

 From the standpoint of an origin server, it only sees one request per 
region of Akamai servers (upper bound, usually lower).  With FreeFlow, the 
origin server has to serve HTML to *every* user, and only the large files 
(images, PDFs, other static content - whatever they tell us to deliver) are 
served by Akamai.

 >- Dan

--
TTFN,
patrick