Chapter 9Network and Server Performance Improvements

Warm Up

The performance techniques we've covered so far have focused on optimizing the front-end of a website—or everything that is downloaded to the browser. In this chapter, we'll focus on improving back-end performance, which involves tweaks to your network and web server.

Content Delivery Networks

A content delivery network (CDN) is a hosting service that's optimized for serving content quickly, in an attempt to overcome latency. If a user in Berlin requests a page that is hosted in San Francisco, on a server without a CDN, all the assets of that page must be retrieved from San Francisco, making its way over the Atlantic ocean. Pretty cumbersome, don't you think? A CDN alleviates this ...

Get Lean Websites now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.