Crescendo's Web Application Performance Blog

In a recent webcast I talked about Crescendo’s Application Delivery Controllers (ADCs) and explained their usefulness in front-ending a web server farm. I started the conversation with an explanation about ADCs and how they load balance traffic but also help you offload heavy performance tasks from the servers. To illustrate this I showed a graph we did measuring server performance under traffic load.

 The graph shows a server handling traffic load created by an Avalanche traffic generator. Traffic rises to 6000 transactions per second (TPS) which the server handles very well. Once traffic rises above 6000 TPS, by a few 100 TPS, the results are catastrophic. The server drops traffic and response time shoots up dramatically.

Up to this point, this explanation is a numbers story. The story is about the threshold the server fails at. This seems like another technical explanation that skirts around the real issue but does not get to the heart of the matter. On a logical level it makes sense, but … so what?

Let’s look at it from another much more interesting perspective. Looking at the same issue from the business side, we can translate dropped connections to business lost - or very likely lost. The very large response times for the customers who do get service translates to frustrated customers and will very likely cause some of them to leave.

 

Looking at it from this perspective, the problem is very intuitive and one that every business must avoid. This is where a good ADC comes into the picture. On top of offloading work from the server and increasing its capacity, Crescendo’s ADC can automatically meter connections to the server and prevent flooding it. The result is that customers get predictable service at all times. The extra capacity the servers can handle with AppBeat DC will also help in cases of large crowd events like a big sale or promotion. In these cases, Crescendo’s ADC can be the conductor orchestrating all the servers to “sing”.

Take a look at the number of connections the same server can support when front ended with Crescendo’s AppBeat DC. The same server can now support 3 times the transactions. What this means is that when your next big sale comes around you can expect your cash registers to keep ringing.

 

Want to learn more about Crescendo’s AppBeat DC? Check out our video Intro to AppBeat DC.

Our tagline "Performance when it matters most" holds true - especially in the EDU market.

To an academic institution, this means your portal and e-learning site is fast and available - any slowdowns or outages can be disastrous, causing huge user frustration. Combine this with recurring events like student enrollment/registration that can dramatically increase load. Even if its only 4 times a year, you can't afford to take chances with your web services. But, predicting traffic surges is nearly impossible.

At Crescendo Networks, we know how to empower EDU sites for performance with unpredictable traffic. We can help you deliver fast, predictable applications under any load.

EDU customers like Rutgers University and Pierce College depend on our AppBeat DC application delivery controller for site performance and availability:

- Improved response times by up to 70%
- Ability to sustain traffic spikes at 10x the average load

Want to learn how much Crescendo's ADC can help your site? Test your site now with Crescendo's Performance Calculator.

If it's not, it's time to start evaluating options. Is your web site ready for 10X traffic? That is the benchmark that most IT professionals plan for around the holiday season. These are happy times that translate into big $$$$. Be sure you have a solution in place that will help you exceed revenue projections!!

So, how do you ensure your site is serving user requests fast and stays up and does not suffer from downtime? Application Delivery Controllers are a key part of a successful network infrastructure. To learn more about planning for unpredictable loads, read this new tech brief today.

Run a free test on your url to learn how Crescendo can help you optimize for the upcoming holiday season. If you need more information, our performance experts are also available to do a quick consultation at your convenience.

Don't wait - the clock is ticking!

Site response time is key to the revenue success of any online company - and it continues to be an area for improvement and optimization.

Crescendo and Alexa have recently teamed up to offer realtime data to show exactly how your site is performing. You can run Crescendo's new performance calculator tool for realtime data or visit http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo to learn how your site compares to to other sites in terms of daily average response time.

Crescendo Networks' AppBeat architecture is the first and only application delivery solution that accelerates, optimizes and controls application performance from the Web front end down to the application transaction level.

Alexa has been crawling the Web since early 1996 and currently gathers approximately 1.6 Terabytes (1600 gigabytes) of Web content per day. This free content site helps IT administrators better understand their web site traffic load and site response times.

Need help understanding how an Application Delivery Controller (ADC) can optimize your site? Contact us today for a free performance consultation.

Some of the trivial options that come to mind are:

• When your website is under heavy traffic load
  
• When your website is not under heavy load but it's the height of the shopping season

Both of these, tie to the raw throughput the system needs to be able to handle. But is there more to it than raw throughput?

In real life, performance could also mean something that is awe inspiring, not necessarily the fastest - like a great play in arts or sports. In sound systems, the ones that perform the best have the highest fidelity of sound. In food, it means the most exquisite taste and display. And in photography it would usually mean the best quality of photos, not the fastest shutter speed.

Thinking back to our website domain, it seems that raw throughput matters, however not less importantly is the smoothness of a website's response. A site that responds to users rapidly and is consistently doing so in different traffic conditions and various loads, is a site that performs extremely well. It is the kind of site that end-users enjoy using. Compare this to sites that are not consistent; their behavior alone could drive end-users away.

It seems that it "matters most" every time end-users are visiting the site. It also seems that performance is not only raw speed, but rather the unique ability to respond consistently during changing circumstances with non-stop predictability.

Performance is something Crescendo does better than any rival product in the ADC market- and its core to your business success. Come see us at Interop booth #2431 and we will demonstrate just why you can rely on us when it matters most.

No, this blog is not about the limbo contest. Its about how fast you can make your web site respond to your customers and prospects.

We have built a very cool new marketing tool that allows you to understand the benefits of a hardware ADC. By deploying an AppBeat CN-7000 appliance, you are able to see great improvements in site response time, server utilization, bandwidth and the number of physical servers required. These calculations offer insight into your site performance.

Test your url today and let us know if you would like to set up time to discuss what makes our top performing hardware ADC the right choice.

We outsource a great deal of our manufacturing, done by subcontractors who specialize in manufacturing electronic products. This week, I and a group of our developers went up north to visit 2 manufacturing contractors and got a tour of their manufacturing facilities. We were literally blown away. The technology behind the manufacturing process is amazing.

The first was Flextronics. They have 16 automated lines that start out with an empty printed circuit board, then automatically insert and place all the components on it, solder them to the board while automatically running quality checks. Subsequently the boards get assembled into a finished product in specially made manufacturing cells. The whole process is highly automated and is constantly going through Kaizen improvement cycles. The efficiencies of the manufacturing line are incredible and due to the Kaizen processes are on an infinite improvement path. The system spits out a finished circuit board at a rate of about 1 per 25 seconds and is intelligent enough to stop the whole line when a quality problem is discovered, and before additional boards get ruined.

From Flextronics, we went back to an earlier phase of the manufacturing process to a sub contractor that manufactures complex circuit boards. For me, especially coming from a background in computer science, a circuit board always seemed like just an epoxy board with a bunch of copper lines and connectors on it. Boy, was I wrong.

Each board has multiple planes of conductors, 50 microns thick, separated from each other by insulating layers of epoxy embedded with glass fibers. A modern printed circuit could have up to 32 different layers which are interconnected through specially drilled and copper plated holes in particular areas on the board. A board is slowly built layer by layer, compressed together and calibrated in special machines. A complex board could go through hundreds of steps until completion, involving photographical methods, chemistry, laser drilling, pressure treating and more. The whole process from start to finish could take up to 2 weeks to complete. Amazing.

To finish up on a very interesting day, we closed the day having a late lunch at a great steak house. I will not go into the manufacturing process there :-)

So back to my marketing question for this year - "Are companies and end-users more tolerant when it comes to web site performance today?"

I realize there are many factors involved with running a popular web site. I also know things get complicated when you examine analytics to determine how each factor relates to revenue. I am not speaking about the usability of a site. I am talking pure performance - the ability for the site to do what it is intended to do within a reasonable and acceptable time period for the person with fingers on the keyboard and shiny credit card sitting close by.

Bojan Simic, Founder of TRAC Research, posted a blog yesterday called "How PowerPoint fell in love with aligning IT with business" - and the struggles that  IT professionals must work out to find the perfect metrics and tools to fully understand how to align performance and revenue (some call it business goals, but heck, we all know revenue is the only thing that really matters).

How much insight do IT folks truly have at the web tier of their business? Can they see that pending requests may have never made it to the other side?  Is there an addressable market ready to convert if they had better connection management? Are the servers over burdened with I/O and CPU intensive tasks? 

Here at Crescendo, we offer an appliance that optimizes and accelerates web traffic so your site can handle ANY load, ANY traffic spike and for those that care - it even improves the end user experience. 

In addition, we offer AppBeat SC, which allows deep insight, monitoring and alerting to your network. We can make the life of an IT administrator easier and allow them to gather stats in a flash.

The message surrounding "availability" may have hits its popularity during the early load balancing days (90s)- but it remains core to every web business on the planet.  Every web site exists to perform a function - and if it's not performant and predictable - well, neither is your online business.

According to Gartner's key IT predictions for 2010 and beyond, issued last week, as many as 20% of businesses will rely solely on cloud computing.  Here's the verbatim prediction:

"By 2012, 20 percent of businesses will own no IT assets." 

You might take issue with the 20% figure, the timeframe, or the 'no IT assets' part of the prediction. However, it's safe to say:

• Software-as-a-service (SaaS) will continue to replace on-premise software in many businesses.
  
• Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) or cloudware will gain acceptance for businesses developing their own applications.

Web application performance will be absolutely critical for the vendors competing for that SaaS and PaaS business. And the growth in these cloud-based, multi-tenant data centers will push us to develop new and innovative ways to accelerate application performance for massive traffic volumes and low latency.

It's an exciting time to be in the application delivery controller market, because we think the ADC will play a critical role in the cloud-based infrastructure. It's essential to optimizing performance to the end user and scaling up web applications. We're constantly developing new features to support the demands of cloud computing providers - most recently, virtual ADC partitioning and elastic resource control.

So, while the IT world is moving the clouds, we'll keep working to build the next-generation hardware-based technologies to support it. 

Cyrus Patton wrote a posting for Mashable on "10 Easy Ways to Green Your Website" that is a good start if you're looking at reducing the impact of your web-based business.

Since we're always thinking about application performance here at Crescendo Networks, we were struck by his point about accelerating web performance as an energy efficiency measure. "Not only does every server request consume energy, the more time people spend waiting for your site to load, the more energy is consumed." We'd never really thought about it at that level.

While Patton stresses using environmentally-friendly web hosting services, there's a larger point for businesses running their own data centers: reducing the overall server footprint is a great to cut energy costs. Not only do you reduce the cost of powering multiple servers, you also cut down on the cooling and management costs associated with those servers.

A smart application delivery controller can help you reduce your web application footprint by offloading processes like TCP management, SSL encryption and compression from servers, freeing capacity. Improving server utilization by 300-500% can decrease the number of web servers you need by 75% or more.

Combine that with using energy-efficient servers, and you could add a real green tinge to your business in 2010 - and save some green as well!