Technologies

Maximum benefit from the existing infrastructure

Just like virtualization, load balancing and clustering, web acceleration is a technique that aims to get maximum benefit from the existing infrastructure. Through web acceleration, we make sure to better use backend servers.

Concretely, we reduce the computing power needed to support large groups of visitors through a web service in the front-end. In other words: web acceleration allows for optimal support of your business by your websites, even at peak hours on the level of visitor statistics. Combell offers web acceleration solutions through caching, TCP/IP offloading and HTTP compression.

Caching

The technique of caching consists in the web service storing images, text fragments and other elements of a website on the user's device.

The next time the web service needs one of those elements, it retrieves it from the device's memory, not from the host's. To make this possible, Combell uses Varnish, a solution based on the principle of the reverse proxy server. The benefit of Varnish is that the solution was also specifically developed as a reverse proxy. That provides very efficient caching. This way, Varnish is definitely more efficient than the solution developed by Squid, which is originally a proxy server that was later converted so it could be used as a reverse proxy.

TCP/IP offloading

When using a web service, TCP/IP packets are grouped and sent to the server as a single entity.

TCP/IP offloading works with TCP/IP engines. A chipset on the network interface then takes over part of the processing of these packets, which is less strenuous for the servers' processors.

HTTP compression

A solution based on HTTP compression can also reduce the load on the servers. Visitors receive the content of a website in compressed form, after which the browser takes care of decompression.

This method reduces traffic over the network. The available bandwidth is less overloaded and there are less data traffic costs. The added load on the end user's computer is insignificant. The use of HTTP compression hardly impedes the end user, quite the contrary, the visited website loads much faster.