Advanced Caching

Many studies have shown that website visitors are impatient with an established scan-click-scan approach to finding and consuming web content.

To keep visitors engaged your site has to deliver pages quickly. A number of factors contribute to the overall time taken to deliver a page to a visitor's web browser and many, such as the visitors connection speed, are not under your control.

Many businesses use shared web hosting solutions for their website as an economical alternative to a dedicated or in-house server. Shared hosts contribute additional factors that impact performance. Typically the overall server loading - how many shared sites are hosted on the same server - can severely affect performance. Although not directly under your control you can choose a shared plan with guaranteed maximum number of sites per server and higher performance hardware.

Factors inside your control are the complexity of your website page designs and the number of elements used to assemble a complete page. Stylesheets, images, scripts and dynamic elements (navigation menus, stock tickers, real-time data etc.) used by a page must all be assembled and downloaded to display the complete page.

A page that only displays text and a few small images will be delivered faster than a page that has to be assembled, by the content management system, from various elements.

Performance

A typical rule-of-thumb for high traffic websites is that:

99% of page requests are processed in less than 2 seconds when there are 200 concurrent visitors

By queuing theory this performance requirement is directly related to the average processing time of the content management system. Assuming that on average each visitor requests a page every 15 seconds, then the system must be able to generate a page in less than 65 milliseconds (0.065 seconds).

Keep in mind this is for relatively high traffic of 200 concurrent users, for a typical business website with 30 concurrent visitors the figure is approximately 250 milliseconds.

To achieve this performance web site designers and developers must monitor the processing time of page elements and ensure they are minimized so that the overall page processing time is within the required limits.

Solution

Without resorting to complex and expensive and server clusters, edge networks, and database servers, caching pages is the most economical and practical solution for the majority of businesses.

Typically website managers have to trade off currency of information for performance. They do this by caching (storing assembled pages) and only updating them periodically. Of course this means you loose the benefits of assembling the page when it is requested such as the ability to delivery real-time information, and scheduling content for display/removal from the site a specific times.

AssetNow NX solves the problem of speed by caching content and automatically clears the cache to deal with content changes. You have complete control over caching and can exclude specific pages (or the entire site) from caching.

Additionally you can exclude specific items within cached pages from the cache. In the above example of a page using text, images, and real-time stock/weather data the page can be cached and the stock/weather data excluded. Each time the page is requested only the stock/weather data has to be updated.

Of course the site layout and page design plays a large part in the performance, however AssetNow NX caching will ensure your pages are delivered as fast as possible by the server and database you use.