Tag: Content Delivery Network

Effective Web Performance – Will A CDN Really Solve The Problem? – UPDATED!!!!

Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) have been available for over a decade, with companies leaning on these distributed networks to accelerate the delivery of their content, absorb the load of the peak traffic periods, and help deal with the problem of geography. During my career I have helped companies assess and evaluate CDN solutions so that they understood the performance improvement benefit they would receive for the money they were spending.

But a something bothered me during these evaluations. I felt that companies were rushing into the decision because it was the “right” thing to do, that their site could only get faster if they used a CDN. This rush often left question unasked and unanswered.

In this post, I want to provide 4 questions that you should ask before deploying a CDN, questions that will help you ensure that a CDN is the performance improvement solution you need right now.

Is the performance issues due to slow application components?

If the performance issue can be tracked down to application elements, then a CDN is likely not the immediate starting point for you and your team. If generating dynamic content or database lookups are causing the performance issue, this is on you, in your datacenter.

CDNs do not make slow applications run faster; CDNs move bits to customers faster more efficiently.

[UPDATE: There are now CDN solutions that can move processing to the Edge (see Akamai Edgeworkers)]

How are we measuring page response times?

If you are measuring response times using the load time of the entire page, then you may be inflating your response times by including all of the third-party content that has been included. You may want to set up parallel measurements that allow you to compare the full page with a page measurement that only includes the content you are directly responsible for managing. If you find that third-party content is slowing down your pages, then a CDN can’t help you.

Full page load times only give you one performance perspective. Modern performance measurement teams need to understand how long it takes for a page to be ready and usable for the customer – the perceived rendering or page ready time. What you could discover is that customers can do 90% of what they want on your page well before all of the content fully loads. If this is true, than the perceived load time for your company to determine that a CDN isn’t necessary right now.

[UPDATE: Google’s Web Vitals metrics are an example of how far the industry has evolved since I wrote this post a decade ago. As well, ensure that your organization does not have tunnel vision on a single performance metric!]

Have we done everything to optimize our own performance?

Often companies choose the easy way (CDN) to solve a hard problem (improve performance). Unfortunately, the easy way can be more expensive than taking the time to design pages and content that ensure long-term and sustainable performance. A CDN could mask a bad design until it slows down so much that even the CDN can no longer help.

Measure your page and challenge the devops team to tweak the exiting design until they don’t think they can get any more performance out of it. Then, during your CDN evaluations, set up measurements that compare the performance of origin and CDN delivered pages. You might find that making the pages as fast as you possibly can before purchasing the services of a CDN make the difference between the origin and CDN times less dramatic than they would have been before optimization.

[UPDATE: I have been doing web performance for 23 years and organizations are still challenged with the design and implementation of performant web applications before they reach the CDN. If the median TTFB for key pages is greater than 500ms, start there.]

Can we effectively estimate if the CDN cost will be offset by an increase in revenue?

CDNs don’t come cheap, so choosing to deploy a CDN better pay for itself over time. Challenge the CDNs you are evaluating to present you with ROI calculations that show how their service more than pays for itself and case studies (or customers) that prove that the cost of the CDN was offset by a business metric that can be easily tracked.

Summary

Don’t misunderstand the questions I am posing here: I am still a strong advocate for the use of CDNs. However, the days of companies simply purchasing the services of a CDN because it’s the “right thing to do” are long over.

As companies evolve their perspective on web and mobile performance, they need to ensure they have done everything they can to make their own applications faster. Once the hard work of tuning and optimization is complete, the process of choosing a CDN must include deeper, more probing questions about the performance and business benefits that come along with the service.

Effective Web Performance: Choosing a CDN

Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) are a key component to any Web performance strategy. If you examine the content from any large online business or media provider, it won’t take long to find the objects that these organizations have entrusted to CDNs to ensure faster delivery and a better user experience.

When working with CDNs, it is critical to understand some terms or concepts that you will be presented with. Each CDN will present them in it’s own unique way and using its own unique terminology. Having an understanding of the underlying concepts, you will be able to have discussions with CDNs that are more meaningful, and targeted on your needs.

The Massively Distributed Model

CDNs fall into one of two categories, the first being the massively distributed model. CDNs that use this method will demonstrate how they have hardware and caching content servers in almost every city and town of any size in the world. As well, they have their systems located on every major consumer network in order to ensure that they are as close to the end-user as possible.

The CDN everywhere model, while far-reaching and seemingly extremely effective does have its disadvantages. First, the CDN infrastructure relies on having extremely accurate maps of the Internet in order to direct visitors to the most proximate CDN server location. However, these maps are only truly effective when visitors use DNS servers that are on the same network that they are. Services such as OpenDNS and DNS Advantage can seriously effect the proximity algorithms of the distributed CDN by removing the key piece of localization information that they need to ensure that the best cache location is selected.

Also, as with any proxy caching methodology, this model relies on use. More popular items stay in the cache longer, while less popular items may be pushed aside or stored further upstream at parent caches for retrieval, adding a few extra milliseconds for the initial request. Also, new content has to be pushed out to the edge, and may take a few hours to be completely propagated.

The Massively Concentrated Model

CDNs that use this model rely on a smaller number of locations than the massively distributed model. However, these locations tend to be massive and incredibly well connected, relying on the concept that even if they are a few more hops away, their content is always there and ready for requests.

These sites have massive amounts of storage and rely on private networks to ensure that new content is immediately pushed out to the super-nodes as soon as it is added. And while they may be those extra few hops away, the performance difference may not be enough for the average site visitor to notice.

The obvious disadvantage of the massively concentrated model is that it is great for serving those places where there is a lot of traffic. However, in regions with less traffic, or less developed infrastructures, the fewer boots on the ground may begin to have an effect on performance.

Other CDN Concepts

Application Proxy

CDNs offer many institutions the ability to use their network for all incoming requests, even if they are for dynamic content that will require processing in the client datacenter. In these instances, the CDN acts as an application proxy, using its superior knowledge of routing and traffic patterns to move requests from the edge of the Internet back to the datacenter more effectively.

Remember: Just because the CDN is providing fast routing and delivery to the visitor, your application is still the bottleneck. Poor app design or slow queries will affect the application in exactly the same way that it would if the call was coming straight to your datacenter.

Traffic Acceleration

In certain circumstances, security and regulatory concerns completely eliminate the ability of a business to use the standard CDN model. Banks, government agencies, and health-care providers cannot store data in an environment whose security they cannot vouch for, no matter how many safeguards are put in place.
These organizations still need to be able to deliver a good customer experience, so there has to be a way to help accelerate their content without taking control of it. Traffic acceleration serves this purpose by using proprietary network protocol adaptations that remove some of the overhead associated with standard network protocols.

Content is intercepted at the datacenter and routed across private networks using the streamlined network protocols to an network location that is as close to the visitor as possible. Once it has reached the appropriate location, it is converted back to standard TCP and passed to the visitor.

The method above describes how a standard Web request works, but this can also be extended to true point-to-point VPNs with endpoints separated by great network and/or physical distances.

Validating the Claims

Any component of choosing or using a CDN is quantifying the effectiveness of the solution. The standard for many years has been the bake-off method of comparison. The prospect’s origin site is measured against the same site delivered by one or more CDNs. The CDN vendor with the fastest performance and the best price usually wins.

Before walking into a bake-off, come prepared. Turn your CDN bake-off into an episode of Iron Chef. Come to the table with the ingredients, and make the CDNs prepare a solution that meets your needs.

Measure Transactions

The standard base measurement that CDNs will use in a bake-off is single object(s) or page measurement. Your visitors do not just visit a single page, so ensure that the CDN has an effective solution that produces noticeable performance improvements across all the key functions of your site, including the secure components of the site, where the money is made.

Measure from the Edge

Backbone measurements are great for baselining and detecting operational issues that require a consistent and stable dataset. Your customers, however, do not have direct connections to high-priced datacenters with fat pipes.

The two CDN models will react differently to under certain circumstances, and this will appear in edge measurements. Measuring on the ground, from the ISPs that your customers use, will give you a clear sense of how much improvement a CDN will provide when compared to the performance of your origin datacenter.

The edge is messy, chaotic, and what your customers deal with everyday.

Understand the SLAs/SLOs

CDNs will always provide either service level agreement (SLA) with service level objectives (SLOs) stated in it. This topic is at once recognizable and about as well understood as 11 Dimensional Theoretical Physics.

I have written briefly about SLAs and SLOs before [here and here]. Do your research before you wade into this polite version of white-collar trench warfare.
Make sure you understand what the goal of the SLA is. Make sure that the SLOs are clear, measurable, valid, and enforceable. Then ensure that the method used to measure the SLOs is one that your organization can understand and can accept as valid.

Finally, ensure that the SLOs are reviewed monthly.

Takeaways

Understanding the foundational technology that underlies the CDNs you use or are considering using will help you make better decisions.

Copyright © 2024 Performance Zen

Theme by Anders NorenUp ↑