CDN Breakthroughs

As we continue to evolve our mobile treatments, we also monitor their effectiveness alongside other optimization solutions. Today I want to call out some interesting results we noted when, as a fun little in-house exercise, we took the O’Reilly website, de-optimized it, and then iterated through a handful of core performance best practices using our FEO service. The goal was to demonstrate the acceleration benefit (in terms of bytes in, start render time, document complete time, connections, and resources) of each practice for a typical 3G mobile user.

While we saw predictable results for step 1 — enabling keep-alives and compression — we were somewhat surprised by what we saw when we added a content delivery network.

Co-founder—and now CEO—Tom Leighton plans data-prioritization trials with Ericsson and massive use of distributed devices for transmitting video.

He says his company, which has 119,000 servers and delivers between 15 and 30 percent of the Web’s traffic, is working on technologies that will lead to services that prioritize different kinds of mobile Web traffic, use distributed devices for storing or “caching” video content, and compress photos selectively depending on what device you are using.