Panel Offers Best Practices for Optimizing Web Applications

For people who go to conferences looking for specific answers, the "Best Practices for Optimizing Web Applications" session at the recent Content Delivery Summit in New York City was a great help. The moderator asked experts from F5 Networks, FastSoft, and CDNetworks real-world questions, such as how to provide optimization for an airline ticketing app and a game. Here's how Dawn Parzych, product manager for F5, started her answer:

"At the core, F5 has -- our BIG-IP is our flagship product, looking at Local Product Manager and WebAccelerator," said Parzych. "For a site like the travel application, you can deploy in either an asymmetric or a symmetric fashion. If you deploy asymmetric, the devices sit in the data center in front of your web servers. Any user that's connecting is connecting into that data center. It's getting TCP optimizations, it's getting off-load, getting front-end optimizations. And that woks really well if all of your users are in a certain geography. As soon as you start adding additional latency into that, you run into not getting a first time visit that's optimal -- which is where a symmetric deployment comes in."

Parzych then dove into the advantage of a symmetric deployment.

"You can put a web accelerator in a data center geographically located close to users in an office somewhere and provide optimizations. We have a global traffic manager which will do global load balancing. Based on where the end-user is, it will be directed to the closest location," added Parzych.

Watch the full panel on optimizing web applications.

Best Practices for Optimizing Web Applications

What is the easiest way to optimize an application, should I purchase an ADC, subscribe to a CDN, install a Front-End optimization solution, deploy a WAN Optimization Controller or do I need all of these? When trying to improve the performance of a web site it is easy to get pulled in many directions and confused with all the varying solutions out there designed to optimize and accelerate applications. In this session attendees will learn about different application delivery optimization solutions on the market, how they differ and which ones incorporate all of these components to improve the end user experience for their web applications.

Moderator: Steve Lerner, Media Practice Director, RampRate Sourcing Advisors
Dawn Parzych, Product Manager, F5
Jerry Hall, VP, Marketing, FastSoft
John McIlwain, Director of Products, CDNetworks