aiScaler benefits with non-cacheable content: it just keeps getting better …
Posted by Max Robbins on October 25th, 2010The non-cacheable/private requests are always forwarded verbatim to the origin servers and obtained responses are fed back to the requesting clients, verbatim[1], without being cached or shared. Even in this situation, with no benefits of caching possible, use of aiScaler offers a very important benefit: it offloads the task of dealing with the client network connections away from the web servers, where each of client connections requires a dedicated process that lives for the duration of connection, to aiCache – which uses extremely efficient, zero-overhead processing of requests/responses. Do not underestimate this benefit – it can be very significant!
To illustrate, let’s imagine a client consuming larger responses from a web site over a slower/congested connection. Without aiScaler front-ending such requests/responses, most existing web servers have to dedicate a whole separate process/thread to sending and/or receiving of this data to such slower client, even when the actual generation or post-processing of the response is very fast.
So you will have to maintain a separate process, with all of the associated overhead for the duration of such connection, which could be 10 and more seconds. Imagine serving more than a hundred responses like that being fed to the clients at the same time and you can probably see how most web farms would have a problem in such a situation. What if you have few tens of thousands of connected users – the situation will only get worse ! And chances are the code that generates the responses also maintains an Application server and a DB connection for the duration of the response, only further compounding the problem and propagating the load to your Application and Database Servers.
Now, with aiScaler front-ending the traffic, the situation is very , very different. It is the aiScaler that obtains a complete request from a client, makes sure it is a valid request and only then, virtually instantaneously, feeds it to an origin server.
Similarly, when on origin server is ready with a response, aiScaler consumes it virtually instantaneously, not tying up the origin server for much longer time like a slower client would. After obtaining a complete response from origin server, aiScaler then feeds to the requesting clients, using its extremely efficient, zero-overhead processing of requests/responses.
Additional benefits that aiScaler offers for non-cacheable requests are optional on-the-fly compression and expanded reporting of plethora of additional statistics, all in real time, including number of connections, request/sec, response processing time, etc .
So to summarize: even if your web site serves significant amount of private, non-cacheable pages, you will still obtains enormous benefits by deploying aiScaler!