Tuesday, August 03, 2010

Website Performance: Use CDN Effectively

In most cases, we consider using a CDN (like Akamai) for static content like images stylesheets and JavaScript whereas ignore it for the HTML content.

Certain HTML might be cacheable. For example, if a certain HTML page changes every hour, for one hour it remains constant. It will be great if this page can be cached by the CDN somehow so that the first request from a region enables the CDN to cache it for the whole region.

The CDN is configurable for your site. Once you access the configuration, there should be options like:
1) Cache content on the edge server basis the cache headers sent by origin OR
2) Cache certain file/folder/url for X minutes/hours

It's imperative to understand and configure the CDN for optimal performance.

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