Making Web Sites Fast

18.4 Making Web Sites Fast

Many of the technologies mentioned in the previous section also help web sites load faster. Server farms and distributed proxy caches or surrogate servers distribute network traffic, avoiding congestion. Distributing the content brings it closer to end users, so that the travel time from server to client is lower. The key to speed of resource access is how requests and responses are directed from client to server and back across the Internet. See Chapter 20 for details on redirection methods.

Another approach to speeding up web sites is encoding the content for fast transportation. This can mean, for example, compressing the content, assuming that the receiving client can uncompress it. See Chapter 15 for details.