What is Application Acceleration?
Application acceleration is the optimization of web application traffic flow for increased backend server performance and faster content delivery to web application clients.
Common techniques for faster content delivery include both client-side and server-side caching, traffic compression, web asset "minification" and concatenation among others. The objective of these techniques is to reduce the number of request-response cycles between client and server and to reduce the time taken to fulfil each request.
- Techniques such as web asset "minification" and concatenation and client-side caching reduce the number of requests a client has to make.
- Techniques such as traffic compression and server-side caching reduce response time.
A common technique for increasing backend server performance is SSL offloading (SSL termination typically being a CPU intensive operation), which frees up resources to serve more client requests.
An application accelerator is a software application or hardware appliance that performs in-line optimization and acceleration of web application traffic.
It is usually situated in a DMZ along with application web servers to which it proxies client requests. External access is typically only provisioned for the application accelerator in DMZ firewall devices.