Web Accelerator Appliances
Has anybody here used a web accelerator?
After doing a Google search on "web accelerator appliance", I've learned that there are a number of companies manufacturing these devices.
One of them is PipeBoost at http://www.pipeboost.com/.
It works, basically, like this:
"The Microsoft Internet Information Server holds the site web pages. A customer requests a page either static or dynamic HTML, ASP, XML, style sheet etc. The server first determines if the customer has a compatible browser. It then pushes down a compressed version of the page to the client. The customer’s browser then decompresses the file and displays it. Only the compressed version of the page is sent.
"The compression process requires a slight increase in CPU utilization for compression/decompression both on the server and client side. Up to 1/10 of the original file size with virtually no additional processor load. Content is compressed prior to SSL encryption and sites employing SSL also reap significant performance increases.
Sounds like a better solution than constantly upgrading your server.
mairving posted this at 01:44 — 16th May 2003.
They have: 2,256 posts
Joined: Feb 2001
I haven't seen that particular one but I am a little leery of their claims.
Christian_SEO posted this at 02:46 — 16th May 2003.
They have: 470 posts
Joined: Mar 2001
I was not aware that decompression was built in to modern browsers, but their site is pretty "snappy".
This is NOT an inexpensive product, but it does have a free trial, so whay not download that puppy and give it a spin?
It's an ISAPI module which can add overhead, but if it does what they say it could help quite a bit.
At some point you WILL have to still upgrade and $1,500 will go along way in that direction.....
Thanks,
Christian
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Mark Hensler posted this at 06:29 — 16th May 2003.
He has: 4,048 posts
Joined: Aug 2000
This is nothing new. And IMO, you shouldn't have to pay for software to take advantage of this technology.
PHP has supported compressed output since version 4.0.5 with ob_gzhandler(). And I believe you could do this manually with prior versions with the Zlib Compression Functions... as long as you had the zlib library (1.0.9+) installed and compiled with PHP (--with-zlib).
I'm not aware of any ASP routines that do this, but I wouldn't be surprised if you found some Open Source scripts on perhaps http://hotscripts.com
How this works:
An 'Accept-Encoding' header is sent as part of the HTTP Request headers (by most browsers). This header (comma delineated) tells the server which types of encoding the browser understands. If you're server can support an encoding type that the browser understands, send an appropriate HTTP Response header ('Content-Encoding') and send all standard output in compressed form.
In the case of PHP, ob_gzhandler() will automatically check this header for 'gzip' or 'deflate'. If present, PHP will gzip all standard output before sending the data to the client. If the header does not contain 'gzip' or 'deflate', all standard output is sent to the client uncompressed.
More info can be found in RFC 2616 section 14.3:
http://www.rfc-editor.org/cgi-bin/rfcdoctype.pl?loc=RFC&letsgo=2616&type=ftp&file_format=txt
http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec14.html
Mark Hensler
If there is no answer on Google, then there is no question.
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