Performance

Cache hit ratios at the edge: a performance study

Hooman Beheshti

In an earlier post, we discussed the meaning of cache hit ratio (CHR) and analyzed what the metric is and isn’t telling us, showing why we really need two different CHR metrics (CHR-edge and CHR-global) to fully understand how a CDN is serving your clients. In this post, we’ll analyze CHR-edge by way of a discussion about performance measurement via testing.

Understanding the Vary header in the browser

Andrew Betts

Browsers need to understand and respond to Vary rules, and the way they do this is different from the way Vary is treated by CDNs. In this post, Principal Developer Advocate Andrew Betts explores the murky world of cache variation in the browser.

The truth about cache hit ratios

Hooman Beheshti

Cache hit ratio is a common metric that evaluates a CDN's performance. Learn more about how to improve your cache hit ratio.

How to Save Christmas for Beyoncé

Anil Dash

This Christmas, Netflix is bringing the world a Beyoncé halftime show, promising unforgettable moments - but will this massive live event go off without a hitch?

Scaling Fastly Network: Fighting FIB | Fastly

João Taveira Araújo

This post is the first in a series detailing the evolution of network software at Fastly. We’re unique amongst our peers in that from inception, we’ve always viewed networking as an integral part of our product rather than a cost center. We rarely share what we do with the wider networking community however, in part because we borrow far more from classic systems theory than contemporary networking practice.

Websites get faster when moving to Fastly

Lucas Olslund

Get real-time content control, boost performance, and develop modern applications, all faster at the edge. See how Fastly stacks up against Cloudflare.

A guide to protecting your data during the holidays

Ashley Hurwitz

Check out this collected guide on cybersecurity best practices to survive the holiday season with Fastly's Next-Gen WAF.

Thriving amidst chaos: Managed security tips for Black Friday weekend

Liam Mayron, David King, + 1 more

Struggling with the chaos of the Black Friday weekend? A Managed Security Provider can alleviate a lot of the stress that comes with the busy shopping season.

Surrogate Keys: Part 1

Tyler McMullen

Here at Fastly HQ, we want websites to be fast. Caching is commonly used to speed up websites. However, caching rapidly changing and unpredictably updated content can be difficult. To make it easier, we built surrogate keys: a system that makes it possible to quickly purge related content.

Surrogate Keys: Part 2

Devon O'Dell

One of my favorite computer science jokes is that there are only two truly difficult problems in computer science: naming things, cache invalidation, and off-by-one errors. At Fastly, we deal with these sorts of difficult problems every day. In our previous post on surrogate keys, we discussed how this feature can help you solve the problem of invalidating dynamic content. In this post, we’ll take a look under the hood at how we efficiently represented this system.

Fastly CDN Expands

Kelly Jandro

At Fastly, we’re constantly working to upgrade our network and expand global capacity. Last week, we built up capacity in our Ashburn, New York City, and Los Angeles POPs and brought a new Miami POP online to improve user experience in South and Central America. We also brought a second London POP online and increased the capacity in our existing London and Frankfurt POPs. In addition to our existing POPs in Tokyo and New Zealand, we’ve added new POPs in Singapore and Hong Kong to bring our customers’ content even closer to users in Asia Pacific. These upgrades are already available to current customers.

API Caching, Part I

Ryan Richards

The web has come a long way since the 90s. In the past, sites were commonly driven by a single, monolithic application that acted as the only communication medium to a centralized database. The modern approach is to break this one large application into a set of interdependent and cooperative services.

API Caching, Part II

Ryan Richards

In Part 1, we covered the basics of using Fastly to accelerate a comments API. Using Instant Purge, we hooked into model callbacks to ensure that the appropriate content was purged from the cache whenever data changed. In this article, we’ll build upon the original approach and use one of Fastly’s more advanced features: cache control.

How Fastly Chooses POP Locations

Chris Hendrie

Build a network that can scale indefinitely, be managed by a small crew of skilled ops and network engineers, and handle current web traffic and the next generation of protocols. Sounds impossible, right?

Not true.

When planning a major content delivery network, you’d think that it would make sense to put your equipment where the most people are, right?

Not always.

Building a Fast and Reliable Purging System

Bruce Spang

At Fastly, we’re always working to make our systems faster and more reliable. One of the more difficult problems we’ve faced is efficient cache invalidation across our global network, or as we call it: Instant Purging. When content changes, our customers issue a purge request, which we then need to deliver to each of our cache servers. The system that handles these purge requests is codenamed Powderhorn.

API Caching, Part III

Ryan Richards

In this, our final API Caching installment, we're going to explore how to use Surrogate Keys to reduce the overall complexity of caching an API.

Caching “Like” and “Share” Buttons

Simon Wistow

In a blog post about caching with tracking cookies, I explained how Fastly’s edge scripting language allows businesses to cache things that were previously uncacheable as well as send data back via our real-time logging system.

But what happens when you need to cache something more complicated, such as a product that handles user interaction?

Using ESI, Part 1: Simple Edge-Side Include

Simon Wistow

Fastly customers can use ESI to cache pages that contain both cacheable and uncacheable content (such as user-specific information).

Stale-While-Revalidate, Stale-If-Error Available Today

Steve Souders

Fastly is excited to announce that as of today, we support stale-while-revalidate and stale-if-error. As a company dedicated to building a better Internet, we work hard to identify and support new standards that move the Web forward. Read on for an explanation of how these Cache-Control extensions make the Web faster and more reliable for browsers and CDNs, and check out documentation of these features.

Hooman Beheshti talks caching | Fastly

Hannah Levy

Hooman Beheshti, VP of Technology at Fastly, recently gave a talk at Velocity NYC 2014 about the challenges CDNs face with dynamic content and how businesses can use programmatic means to fully integrate their applications with their CDN.