Keynote abstract

Summary form only given. In this talk I will sketch some challenges in improving Web-site or Web-application performance from the perspective of the CDN. To motivate the problem I will provide some summary statistics describing the constitution of a modern Web site, and approximate timing data on the network-layer operations needed to deliver that content to an end-user. To establish background I´ll move quickly through a set of relatively well-known techniques for improving Web site performance: caching, TCP-layer optimization, route optimization via overlay networks, data deduplication, prefetching. In the latter part of the talk I will cover, in more depth, two specific problems Akamai continues to research and refine: optimizing the performance of TCP connections on http content, and parent selection in overlay networks. I´ll give examples of challenges that exist in this space, and highlight ongoing research at Akamai to address them.