Akamai Integration

posted by mark in Snooth

We’re constantly looking for ways to make Snooth better, and one of the best ways to have a great site is to have a well performing site. I come from a background in large scalable websites, and there are a number of tips and tricks, from backend query optimization and caching to front end request massaging and browser control.

One issue with global website performance is that of latency. Ultimately, when we’re talking about moving data around the world, the speed of light becomes a hard limit for how fast we could possibly perform. How can we solve the problem of serving content quickly to Snooth users in Europe or Asia, when our servers are in North America? The answer is to put the server close to the user!

Enter the CDN or Content Delivery Network, a distributed network of connected servers across the world. When a Snooth user in Asia requests a page on our site, most of the content they would download is delivered to them from a server within their city, on their network, instead of from our origin server. Initial reports from Snooth users are that their page load times have halved or even quartered.

There are many companies acting as CDNs, after looking at the options we decided to go with Akamai. Their network is unquestionably huge, 25,000 servers strong, and worldwide. We’re happy to be able to leverage such a wide reaching network to bring you a better performing Snooth!

As always, happy to hear your thoughts, and have a great weekend.