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Speed Engine – Concepts

Estimated reading: 4 minutes

Loading speed is one of the most important metrics in the web industry. Search engines for example take website’s speed very seriously nowadays and speed has a definite role in their ranking algorithms. Powerful tools and utilities are available on the web to guide us in achieving the best website delivery speeds. The recommendations are in majority related to code restructuring and request handling improvements.

While ClusterCS does not manage your code, it can surely help with the server-side optimizations, this being the key purpose of the Speed section.

The classic concept of a web server is the traditional LAMP – Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP. This means that when you install a website such as WordPress on these setups, your resolving web service is Apache which handles all the requests. A web page load generally contains the main “URL” request which delivers the page html which in return triggers additional requests for all the static content (such as images, JavaScript, CSS) and other dynamic content requests (such as AJAX requests). Apache is a great web server for resolving requests, but it can lose performance when bombarded with requests.

ClusterCS proposes a modern approach to serving web content by providing the possibility to handle requests with the most suitable web service which leads to faster and better SEO ranked responses.

If we take the previous example of web requests which trigger a main “URL” request and then 50 to 100 images, js and CSS files (imagine the numbers when you have a high number of users on your web sites), instead of sending everything to Apache we can route only the main html request to Apache and rest of the static files to a fast, lightweight service such as Lighttpd or NGINX. This diminishes the effort on Apache tremendously and will have an important improvement on how your servers handle the incoming traffic and how it’s responses are ranked in SEO.

Response times can be greatly improved by utilizing caching. Choosing ClusterCS caching automation will ensure an immediate and hassle-free caching implementation. Varnish and NGINX both provide great caching mechanisms and are trusted all over the world in many environments.

Experienced users can further customize the web service configs. ClusterCS automation focuses on helping save time with many config scenarios and providing advanced strategies, while allowing specific customizations. ClusterCS provides the configs resulting from the routing automations and they can be further configured for specific functionalities.

ClusterCS Speed section is a great resource for both novice/non-technical users and experienced sysadmins. Our Support Team will always be there to guide users on how to create the best setups, therefore don’t hesitate to request information.

ClusterCS can also help with A/B testing for web server delivery architectures. We often find ourselves wondering if using a different approach can bring benefits, but we might lack the time or in-depth knowledge on how to test or switch to new ideas. With ClusterCS you can easily switch between ideas as you are backed up by reliable automations that reconfigure your server across many web services. This way you can avoid wasting hours or days on manual setups, not to mention possible mistakes that are hard to debug.

Complex server cluster architectures bring a whole other level of complexity to the table. ClusterCS hides the complexity of the underlying server infrastructure and implements the routing automation as easily as with single servers. If you outgrow a single server or require high availability to your web site(s), a cluster of servers managed by ClusterCS will not be a step in the unknown but rather a simple and normal evolution to your business.

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