Accelerating web applications is always a balance of performance gains versus investment—in both time and money. Adding dedicated software or hardware point solutions can be expensive and introduce administrative overhead. Content delivery networks can have unpredictable ongoing costs. Recoding applications can impact time to market of new versions or other applications. The F5 solution adds application acceleration functions into the application delivery layer and promotes a simple acceleration policy that results in greatly reduced cost and complexity. Check out https://f5.com/solutions/enterprise/reference-architectures/acceleration for diagrams, white papers and how-to guides.
14. Next Steps
• Use the F5 FAST tool to estimate your potential performance gains
• Review the F5 Acceleration Reference Architecture for more details
Editor's Notes
http://www.webperformancetoday.com/2013/05/06/psychology-waiting-faster-online-checkout/
Does anyone like slow applications. 5 seconds is actually a long time.
So more mobile devices over higher latency radio networks and larger webpages. Hmm sounds like a recipe for application performance problems.
http://www.fiercewireless.com/special-reports/3g4g-wireless-network-latency-how-do-verizon-att-sprint-and-t-mobile-compar
http://techcrunch.com/2013/05/29/mary-meeker-2013-internet-trends/
http://www.pewinternet.org/fact-sheets/mobile-technology-fact-sheet/
So here we have the scenario – users want applications always on always fast and available everywhere – every location and on every device.
Applications are often not written to deal with latency – they are chatty, and not optimized.
The network usually works pretty well actually but you can’t alter the laws of physics
For mobile users there is going to be a carrier network involved – local network admins are not going to have a lot of control over this.
So what can you do Can you lower the users expectations – no, can you reduce the latency in the AT&T carrier network – no. Well the network works ok, can you recode the app? Probably not easily.
So what can you do?
You can use a CDN – and that might be a good idea – but they come with variable costs and are really just fancy caches local to your users – that might not be enough
You can deploy additional infrastructure maybe some dedicated acceleration devices but they again cost money and can be complex – plus another o/s devicece learn
Or you can enable acceleration as part of a new or existing F5 deployment.
The idea here is simplicity. Turn on three things and make it go a bit faster.
TCP – now with new features like rate pacing and advanced congestion control algorithms which have been tuned to deal better with latency rather than loss. This genuinely will make a difference.
HTTP protocol inefficiencies exacerbated on mobile devices
Additional latency inherent in WAN
No multiplexing of requests in a connections – needs more connections
SPDY
Multiplexed bi-directional streams within TCP connection
Fewer network connections required
HTTP header compression
NB we don’t support SPDY push yet – so be wary of number that give performance improvements of SPDY when comparing a SPDY enabled server vs our SPDY profile.
Here we are talking about
Compression
IBR
Intelligent Client Cache
Content spooling
These are components of the fundamental policy that we are advising be deployed.
All this can be delivered from the all-active, highly available, elastic, multi-tenant application services fabric.
So we have given you a simple solution – one that can deliver real results in a few hours of implementation. Have we dumbed down the product? No, all the high end features are still there. Whatever the size of your application delivery problem we have a solution to accelerate it. We will continue to innovate and simplify your life.
So, you’re convinced – great – how about we give you some idea of the benefits you might see before you start? Use the FAST tool to quickly get a real world assessment of how much we can speed up your site or application. Where we found optimizations, they averaged 30%.
