Slide deck from Strangeloop president Joshua Bixby's presentation at the 2012 Content Delivery Summit.
Many content owners are already using a content delivery network (CDN) to cache content closer to their visitors, but CDNs don't reduce the number of requests required to render each page, and they have no impact on browser efficiency. Front-end optimization (FEO) picks up where CDNs leave off, transforming the content itself so that it renders as quickly as possible in the browser.
In this presentation, attendees will see real-world examples of how leading e-commerce sites have combined CDN and FEO forces to reach new levels of performance for content-rich pages. Get real numbers on how quickly content-rich sites loaded pre-acceleration, then with just a CDN, then with a combined CDN/FEO solution.
Organizations that recognize the need to take their website’s performance to the next level need to change their basic assumption about acceleration. This change is not a 180-degree turn, however – it’s an evolutionary change. Delivery-based solutions such as CDNs and network devices still form a solid foundation for a total acceleration solution. Transformation-based solutions complement this foundation.Delivery: “I will deliver what the server gives me as efficiently as possible to the browser.”Transformation: “I will transform what the server gives me, and optimize it for the user’s browser.”
Here we see three waterfall graphs showing how web page objects are delivered from the server to the browser.OriginalThis is an unaccelerated site, with 63 objects making 63 roundtrips between server and browser. The total page load time is 9.5 seconds.DeliveryThis graph shows how a delivery solution – comprised of a content delivery network (CDN) and an application delivery controller (ADC) – shortened these roundtrips by bringing content closer to the user’s browser. There were still 63 roundtrips, but the total page load time was 5.7 seconds.TransformationThis graph shows how Strangeloop worked in conjunction with the CDN and ADC to not just shorten the roundtrips, but reduce the number of roundtrips required – from 63 to just 9. The result: The same page loads in just 2.1 seconds. It is important to remember that 2 seconds is the goal that every site should be aiming for, based on current user expectations. It’s also worth remembering that only one company out of the Fortune 500 actually meets this standard.
We’ll use it to describe where performance pain points are, but that doesn’t mean the page actually has these problems
Despite already using a CDN, AutoAnything knew they could be even faster. The site’s home page took up to 10 seconds to load.Biggest problem was page bloat: too many objects.Strangeloop FEO cut their average page load in half.