What is Web Application Acceleration?
Web application acceleration is the acceleration of content delivery between a web application server and client devices through the optimization of network traffic. Measures to achieve web application acceleration include SSL offloading, compression, minification, caching and concatenation of content served within network traffic between servers and clients. A hardware or software web accelerator appliance is typically used to provide this functionality.
Why use a web accelerator?
Web acceleration uses various techniques such as compression and caching to speed up content transfers between a web server and client browsers, this will lead to lower latency and better overall performance of the website.
Functions of our web accelerator
- Compression
- Caching
- Content Rewriting
- Customizability
- Delivering a better experience for users
Compression
A web accelerator compresses image and video files to reduce the transfer times of the data. It does this by lowering the quality of the image or by sending only what has changed since the file was last viewed.
Caching
This process caches recently accessed files so that the accelerator can return the file directly to the client on the next request. This means the reply is returned quicker to the client and the webservers don't spend unnecessary processing time on commonly served content. The time period can also be controlled for how long cached content is held.
Content Rewriting
PageSpeed engine can rewrite the content as and when it passes through the accelerator, this makes performing tasks like combining CSS and Javascript or minification of content much easier. It also processes re-encoding of images and rewrites pages to improve speed.
Customizability
All metrics displayed within Snapt can be accessed via our API and all the data is stored within SQL Databases that are openly accessible, this includes writing your own SQL queries and scripts.
Delivering a better experience for users
When running a website you want to make everything on the site more engaging so that you can get an increase in users who visit your website, but with an increase in users, you might experience slow site performance and page downloads.
These issues will lead to the website no longer being appealing to some users and you will begin more people leaving your website within the first few seconds. This is commonly referred to as "Bounce Rate". A web accelerator can help to alleviate many of the common symptoms of a slow website and can drive down your bounce rate drastically.