Content delivery networks (CDN) and front-end optimization (FEO) are the current mainstream solutions for website performance optimization (WPO) – but neither adequately addresses dynamic content and static content with dynamic elements, as this type of content is generated on the fly from databases that can’t be replicated in the traditional CDN model and faces network latency issues that FEO doesn’t address. Therefore the content must be delivered from origin servers and thus faces the issue of distance-related network latency.

The definition of WPO is expanding to address this type of content through new origin content acceleration (OCA) solutions. This whitepaper will review the performance challenges facing website operators and will evaluate the problems solved by each of the web performance improvement technologies. The whitepaper will also introduce OCA as an emerging approach to speed up origin-served content and will provide more details on solutions from OCA leader FastSoft.

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Content delivery networks (CDN) and front-end optimization (FEO) are the current mainstream solutions for website performance optimization (WPO) – but neither adequately addresses dynamic content and static content with dynamic elements, as this type of content is generated on the fly from databases that can’t be replicated in the traditional CDN model and faces network latency issues that FEO doesn’t address. Therefore the content must be delivered from origin servers and thus faces the issue of distance-related network latency.

The definition of WPO is expanding to address this type of content through new origin content acceleration (OCA) solutions. This whitepaper will review the performance challenges facing website operators and will evaluate the problems solved by each of the web performance improvement technologies. The whitepaper will also introduce OCA as an emerging approach to speed up origin-served content and will provide more details on solutions from OCA leader FastSoft.

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TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) is the most common transport layer protocol that provides a reliable stream of data end-to-end from a server to a client, possibly over unreliable paths. The basic design was invented by Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn in their 1974 paper “A protocol for packet network intercommunication”. It was subsequently developed into the TCP/IP standard (RFC 791 and RFC 793) in 1981. The original TCP standard includes a mechanism to prevent a TCP sender from overwhelming a TCP receiver (what was called flow control), but no mechanism to prevent a TCP sender from overwhelming the network (what was called congestion control).

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Wes Simpson, President of Telecom Product Consulting, takes on the challenge of making sense out of web acceleration technologies. "Web acceleration has a lot of appeal, on both an emotional and on an economic level. After all, who wouldn’t want to do things quicker on the Internet and save money at the same time? However, when most people go to investigate this market space, there is a bewildering variety of technologies available, and a large number of suppliers all claiming that their solution is the best."

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This white paper describes transfer time benchmarks for common file downloads over various link speeds with and without FastSoft acceleration.

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There are several choices when it comes to WAN Optimization and Application acceleration technology: WAN Appliance vendors, Content Delivery Networks (CDN), Application Delivery Networks (ADN), and software suites designed to speed file transfers along the “digital supply chain.” This white paper explores the solutions available today, examine their different approaches, and also looks at a segment of the market that has remained unsolved until recently: the “one to many” acceleration of large files via TCP that do not require either hardware or a software client at the receiving end.

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FastTCP: From Theory to Experiments: In this IEEE publication, FastSoft’s founders, Steven Low and Cheng Jin describe the FastTCP variant of TCP and how it sustains high throughput and utilization at multigigabits per second over large distances. It discusses the background theory behind FastTCP, its key features and their first experimental results.

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