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Performance
The key to understanding your end user? Performance monitoring
We’re constantly monitoring our CDN’s performance from as many locations and network providers around the world as possible. Monitoring performance matters — not just for your servers and…
The benefits of using Varnish
At the core of Fastly is Varnish, an open source web accelerator that’s designed for high-performance content delivery. Varnish is the key to being able to accelerate dynamic content, APIs…
Common causes of a poor cache hit ratio and how to deal with them
The cache hit ratio (or hit ratio for short) is the ratio of hits to cacheable requests (hits and misses combined). There's also cache coverage, the ratio of cacheable requests to all…
Analyze your origin logs to get a higher cache efficiency
If you want to increase the efficiency of your Varnish (or Fastly) cache, you need to figure out what traffic is not cached. By definition, any traffic that reaches your origin is not cached…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Improving the Delivery of Large Files With Streaming Miss and Large File Support
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…
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…
Caching the Uncacheable - Hooman Beheshti's Talk at Velocity NYC 2014
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…
