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Accelerating Rails, Part 2: Dynamic HTTP Caching
In the second part of our series on accelerating Rails, I'll cover configuration of a few Fastly features, Varnish and Varnish Configuration Language (VCL), and strategies for caching dynamic content that are targeted towards the Rails developer.
Normalizing the Host Header
In the continued quest to increase cache hit ratios, the chant is: "Normalize, normalize, normalize." Less variation in your requests means you have a higher chance of getting hits. This month's highlight is the Host header.
Fastly updates terms, privacy, and use policies | Fastly
Security, compliance and transparency are very important to us at Fastly, and these updates will help protect our customers as well as our company.
Caching the Uncacheable: CSRF Security
In this post, I investigate several strategies for maintaining security while improving cacheability. I use Ruby on Rails for the examples, but the techniques apply to nearly any web application framework.
Join Fastly’s New Community Forum
We’re beyond excited to introduce you to Fastly’s Community Forum. We’ve been working closely with our community to build an interactive, inclusive hub for our customers and fellow web performance nerds. The Forum is a place to share knowledge, give and receive help, and learn more about Fastly.
Don’t Let Your Site Crash and Burn This Holiday Season
Americans are expected to spend $89 billion shopping online this holiday season, according to Forrester Research. Is your ecommerce site ready for the massive spike in traffic?
Accelerating Rails, Part 1: Built-in Caching
Caching is one strategy that helps ease scaling pains that I often see Rails developers overlooking. Starting out with caching can be confusing, because terms and documentation can be convoluted, especially if you’re not an expert.
Using ESI, Part 2: Leveraging VCL and ESI to Use JSONP
In this post, I’m going to discuss how you can leverage ESI and VCL (Varnish Configuration Language, the domain-specific language that powers Fastly’s edge scripting capabilities) to use JSON responses, even when they’re loaded from another site. This is useful in many cases, including various analytics and social sharing instances.
Overriding Origin TTL in Varnish, or My Beginner's Mistake
A long time ago, I was helping out at a gaming conference where there was an intranet CMS using a Twitter search plugin. Unfortunately, the rather saturated Internet connection was slowing down all of the Twitter search requests. Each page needed 4 searches, at 500ms each, for a total of 2-3 seconds per page.
Understanding Fastly’s Cloud Accelerator
Today, we’re happy to announce a collaboration with Google Cloud Platform that will combine the power of Google’s infrastructure with the speed of our real-time content delivery network.
Large File Delivery Improved with Streaming Miss Support | Fastly
Today, we’re excited to announce two related features that lower bandwidth costs and reduce origin load for Fastly customers, resulting in faster downloads for their users: Streaming Miss and Large File Support.
New Gzip Settings and Deciding What to Compress
Fastly recently conducted an extensive analysis of which resources should be compressed. Today, the results of that analysis are reflected in the Fastly app, which allows our customers to adopt better gzip settings. This not only makes our customers' websites faster, but it will also reduce monthly bandwidth charges.
Catch Digital to Write VCL for Fastly and Drupal
We recently decided to work with Leon Kessler at Catch Digital to introduce VCL that would make it easier for new Drupal customers to get up and running with Fastly. Here’s how we did it, and how you can use it to improve the performance of your websites, mobile applications, and APIs.
Disabling SSLv3 Due to POODLE Vulnerability
Based on our understanding of the POODLE vulnerability (mainly the fact that there is currently no workaround), and the fact that we have very little traffic running over SSLv3 (around .5% globally), we are disabling SSLv3 for all Fastly SSL customers, effective immediately. This will mainly affect users of Windows XP Pre-service pack 3 combined with IE version 6. If you are in this group, please upgrade to a more recent browser.
Increase Your Hit Ratio With This Simple Tip
If you're caching URLs that include user input, such as a search box, and the search is case insensitive, there's a really easy way to increase your hit ratio: convert the URL to lowercase.
Enhancing, Formatting and Analyzing Fastly Logs
This blog post will outline (1) how you can log additional data in your Fastly logs, (2) how to update your logging format so that it’s both human-readable and easily analyzed by your logging providers, and (3) how you can analyze and spot trends in your data.
Learn More About Fastly Features With Inline Help
This week, we’re rolling out Inline Help, a new enhancement to our user interface that will make Fastly easier to use for new customers and seasoned experts.
Hooman Beheshti talks caching | Fastly
Hooman Beheshti, VP of Technology at Fastly, recently gave a talk at Velocity NYC 2014 about the challenges CDNs face with dynamic content and how businesses can use programmatic means to fully integrate their applications with their CDN.
Using Boltsort to Make API Caching More Efficient
There's a Fastly module available called "boltsort" which allows you to easily sort the parameters in the query string, so that you will always end up with the same URL, no matter what order the consumer of your API placed them in.
Stale-While-Revalidate, Stale-If-Error Available Today
Fastly is excited to announce that as of today, we support stale-while-revalidate and stale-if-error. As a company dedicated to building a better Internet, we work hard to identify and support new standards that move the Web forward. Read on for an explanation of how these Cache-Control extensions make the Web faster and more reliable for browsers and CDNs, and check out documentation of these features.
