How To Get Faster Application Performance Over The Internet
A friend of mine runs a company that runs training labs for IT users all over the world. He had a problem with his latest application, which was a lab simulator for a complex server, storage, and virtualization environment. The problem was, everybody outside the United States was experiencing extremely slow performance.
Application performance over the Internet is a tricky thing. It depends on a number of different aspects of the TCP/IP stack working correctly. TCP is a protocol that is optimized for reliable transmission of traffic over a medium in which packets are expected to be dropped. It does this through a combination of packet retransmission requests, packet sequence ordering, and TCP windowing. TCP automatically adjusts to the available bandwidth by using dynamic windowing, and it always starts with a small window and ramps up to the point where TCP packets dropped that have to be retransmitted, so there is always a slow start in any Internet connection. Because of the TCP windowing, if any packets are dropped during a TCP/IP session, the window size gets smaller and effective bandwidth for the application drops.
When Internet traffic is transmitted over long distances, it is sent through a number of different service providers, which connect through peering points. Packets are dropped in these peering points because of the lower speed connections between different service providers. When packets are dropped, the TCP protocol reduces the bandwidth, which also reduces application performance and increases latency. For this reason, large organizations have avoided the Internet for application delivery.
What my friend needed was a way to do application acceleration for individual users over the Internet, without installing any applications on their PCs, or putting any special hardware at their location at all. This is trickier than it sounds, since each of the reasons for TCP bandwidth limitation have to be addressed in order to have the application work properly. After the TCP protocol issues are addressed, then the information needs to be compressed at the head end and expanded at the remote site, which would effectively increase the available bandwidth for the application and then accelerate the application speed.
In order to build this out himself, he would need to get servers and software at the head end and all the remote sites near his customers. This software who would have to do the compression and expansion, dynamic DNS to send the end user to the correct remote site server, and send multiple packets over different routes to ensure delivery. This system would also need to be monitored to make sure everything was running properly all the time.
Knowing this type of system held would’ve been too expensive, obviously. In looking for a solution to his problem, he found a company that offers all these things as a service. The company already has over 50,000 servers in data centers worldwide, and have been doing this content acceleration for years. There are many different types of content that can be accelerated over the Internet:
- Faster virtual desktop infrastructure delivery.
- Speed up any end-user applications delivered by HTML or IP.
- End user VPN clients.
- Faster transfers of large files.
- WAN supplementation or replacement.
Most organizations have some application that gets complaints towards latency and slow delivery. This would be the best one to use as a test environment because the difference would be most noticeable. For further information, contact a local reseller that knows the ins and outs of networking and can determine if this is an appropriate service for you.
Looking to find the best deal on Internet application acceleration, then visit www.adcapnet.com to find the best advice on network upgrades for you.