F5 Friday: Speed Matters

Google finally catches on and begins to develop what application delivery vendors have been doing for years.

It’s a primary axiom of web operations and networking: speed matters. One has only to look at the number of niche products that focus on speed: WAN optimization, application acceleration, caching, content delivery networks, and continuing increases in the core speeds and feeds of our networks. So it shouldn’t be a surprise when “cloud” providers start talking about performance as a differentiator, which is exactly what Google recently noted at the Velocity conference.

The average web page takes 4.9 seconds to load and includes 320 KB of content, according to Urs Hölzle, Google’s Senior Vice President of Operation. In his keynote Wednesday morning at the O’Reilly Velocity 2010 conference in Santa Clara, Calif., Hölzle was preaching to the choir, addressing a crowd of 1,000 attendees focused on improving the performance and profitability of their web operations.

-- Google: How We’re Making the Web Faster

The aforementioned article goes on in varying degrees of detail, to describe how Google is making their web sites faster through a combination of protocol enhancements, GeoLocation, and compression. What’s ironic (and frustrating) is that these are many of the same solutions to the same problems that application delivery vendors have been espousing for years and that are leveraged by a variety of folks to improve the performance of their web operations. The irony of the organization that likes to develop everything from the ground up is that sometimes they hit upon something new and other times they essentially end up re-inventing wheels. In the case of Google’s improvements regarding web application performance, they’re in the middle. In general, all the improvements that Google espouses are ones that application delivery vendors have long known about and implemented.

Let’s briefly take a look at each one, shall we?

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