Performance
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Caching with CORS
Rogier Mulhuijzen
Before diving into CORS (Cross-origin resource sharing), I need to mention JSONP, which is the other solution to getting data from a different “Origin.” In Using ESI, Part 2: Leveraging VCL and ESI to Use JSONP, Simon explains what JSONP is, and how to cache it with Fastly, using one Fastly specific feature, req.topurl. Now, with Varnish 4.1, req.top.url (note the extra period) is available, and it allows you to do the same thing with vanilla Varnish.
Why Marketers Should Prioritize Performance
Anna MacLachlan, Hannah Levy
You may not know that the software your developers use can affect the success of your marketing activities. It’s within both teams’ interests to collaborate to ensure good performance.
Fastly Cloud Accelerator to Connect with GCP | Fastly
Lee Chen
In November 2014, we announced Fastly’s Cloud Accelerator, a collaboration with Google Cloud Platform that combines the power of Google’s infrastructure with the speed and flexibility of our real-time content delivery network. We're seeing more of our customers leverage cost-effective cloud services to build scalable infrastructure, and so today we're excited to announce that we're expanding our collaboration with Google Cloud Platform.
Surviving high-traffic events with Fastly
Anna MacLachlan
A CDN not only shields your origin from spikes in traffic, but it also ensures speedy delivery of content. This helps you meet your users’ expectations when they visit your site, whether that’s reading the latest news on the royal baby or purchasing a coveted item during a flash sale. To do this well, your CDN needs to have a few key qualities, including prioritizing site uptime and performance, the ability to make updates and serve content in real time, and up-to-the-second visibility into logs and performance analytics. Below, Fastly’s customers discuss how our CDN has helped them during high-traffic events.
Improve performance, get user intel with GeoIP | Fastly
Anna MacLachlan
In a previous post, I discussed the benefits of Fastly edge modules. Among those listed is GeoIP / Geography Detection, which is useful for any company (especially those in ecommerce, hospitality/travel, and media) that needs to segment content delivery based on geographic location.
Leveraging your CDN to cache "uncacheable" content
Hooman Beheshti
As I've written about before, there is a growing class of content called “event-driven content” that may appear dynamic, but isn’t. Even though caching this type of content is more difficult, it’s possible to cache it with the right tools — although you might have been told otherwise. In doing so, you can leverage the power of caching in new ways and reap the benefits that come along with it.
Reusing backend connections to increase performance
Rogier Mulhuijzen
Reusing connections between your Varnish instance and your backends (origins) is a good idea for multiple reasons. If your Varnish is on the same network as your backends and you're doing low volume traffic, you can stop reading, because a) the difference will probably be negligible, and b) you're probably already reusing backend connections.
The Rise of Event-Driven Content
Hooman Beheshti
In this post and going forward, we’re going to take a step back, talk about the different types of content our customers are dealing with the most, and discuss how cacheable or uncacheable they are.
Fastly’s edge modules that will power your ecommerce site
Anna MacLachlan
Ecommerce companies face challenges that a content delivery network built on Varnish can help address. To stay competitive and relevant, ecommerce websites and applications need to be able to target specific content to specific users (based on location, language, or browsing preferences), tailor content delivery depending on which device a consumer is using, and prioritize shoppers based on actions they’ve taken within a site or app.
Understanding Your End User with Performance Monitoring
Jason Evans
End users are consumers who will use a service, and monitoring their performance is often overlooked. See how monitoring performance of end users improves user experience.
The benefits of using Varnish
Anna MacLachlan
Varnish is an open source web accelerator that is designed for high-performance content delivery. Learn more about what Varnish is and how Fastly's varnish can help accelerate your content.
Introducing Soft Purge
Tyler McMullen
Today, we’re excited to announce Soft Purge, a new purging feature that allows you to easily mark content as outdated (stale) instead of permanently deleting it from Fastly’s caches. With Soft Purge, you have the same real-time purging options that you get with Instant Purge: purge by URL or by surrogate key.
Cache hit issues? Fix it | Fastly.
Rogier Mulhuijzen
The cache hit ratio (or hit ratio for short) is the ratio of hits to cacheable requests (hits and misses combined). There's also cache coverage, the ratio of cacheable requests to all requests (cacheable requests and passes). In most cases, you'll want both to be as high as possible, since misses and passes cause load on your origins, and are slower than cache hits.
How our solid-state drives result in cost savings for customers
Simon Wistow
Solid-State Drives (SSDs) are semiconductor-based storage devices that save persistent data by using NAND flash memory. See how Fastly manages caches with SSDs and how you can save.
Boost Cache Efficiency with Origin Log Analysis
Rogier Mulhuijzen
If you want to increase the efficiency of your Varnish (or Fastly) cache, you need to figure out what traffic is not cached. By definition, any traffic that reaches your origin is not cached, and thus worthy of investigation.
Accelerating Rails, Part 2: Dynamic HTTP Caching
Michael May
In the second part of our series on accelerating Rails, I'll cover configuration of a few Fastly features, Varnish and Varnish Configuration Language (VCL), and strategies for caching dynamic content that are targeted towards the Rails developer.
Normalizing the Host Header
Rogier Mulhuijzen
In the continued quest to increase cache hit ratios, the chant is: "Normalize, normalize, normalize." Less variation in your requests means you have a higher chance of getting hits. This month's highlight is the Host header.
Accelerating Rails, Part 1: Built-in Caching
Michael May
Caching is one strategy that helps ease scaling pains that I often see Rails developers overlooking. Starting out with caching can be confusing, because terms and documentation can be convoluted, especially if you’re not an expert.
Using ESI, Part 2: Leveraging VCL and ESI to Use JSONP
Simon Wistow
In this post, I’m going to discuss how you can leverage ESI and VCL (Varnish Configuration Language, the domain-specific language that powers Fastly’s edge scripting capabilities) to use JSON responses, even when they’re loaded from another site. This is useful in many cases, including various analytics and social sharing instances.
Large File Delivery Improved with Streaming Miss Support | Fastly
Simon Wistow
Today, we’re excited to announce two related features that lower bandwidth costs and reduce origin load for Fastly customers, resulting in faster downloads for their users: Streaming Miss and Large File Support.
