How To Get Faster Application Performance Over The Internet

I have a friend whose company delivers IT training through remote lab simulation for customers all over the world. There was a problem with his newest product, which was a remote lab that included servers, shared storage, all in a real world virtualization set up. All of the users outside of the United States were having performance and latency issues.

Application performance over the Internet is a tricky thing. It depends on a number of different aspects of the TCP/IP stack working correctly. TCP is a protocol that is optimized for reliable transmission of traffic over a medium in which packets are expected to be dropped. It does this through a combination of packet retransmission requests, packet sequence ordering, and TCP windowing. TCP automatically adjusts to the available bandwidth by using dynamic windowing, and it always starts with a small window and ramps up to the point where TCP packets dropped that have to be retransmitted, so there is always a slow start in any Internet connection. Because of the TCP windowing, if any packets are dropped during a TCP/IP session, the window size gets smaller and effective bandwidth for the application drops.

What happens when TCP/IP traffic is transmitted worldwide, especially over the Internet when it goes through a number of different service providers and their peering points, is that packets are dropped as a matter of course. Due to the inherent nature of the protocol and situation, this means bandwidth, performance, and latency are going to be poor for an application requiring interactivity. Large organizations have always done with this issue by building out a worldwide private Wide Area Network.

My friend needed a way to accelerate the Internet delivery of an application for individual users, without putting any program on their PC or installing special hardware at their site. This is very difficult to do, because the application required reliable delivery of all its parts, and the very nature of TCP over the Internet would slow it down. Furthermore, he wanted to be able to increase the effective bandwidth by compression then expansion of the data delivered.

If he were to build out this, he would need a special acceleration server at his data center, and then another acceleration server at the Internet point of presence closest to each of its customers. The servers would have to be able to send packets to each other in a multiple redundant routes, perform compression using all the available current algorithms, have dynamic DNS to reroute the request to the server closest to the end-user, and the monitored all the time to make sure everything was working properly.

This would’ve cost too much money for my friend. Instead, he was able to find a company that offers this type of acceleration as a service. This company already has tens of thousands of servers in data centers worldwide, and they are already accelerating content for customers. Types of content that can be optimized over the Internet are:

- Faster virtual desktop infrastructure delivery.

- Any applications that use HTML or TCP/IP for delivery.

- Remote office and end-user VPN acceleration.

- Faster transfers of large files.

- Shift application delivery from the WAN to the Internet.

Most organizations have some application that gets complaints towards latency and slow delivery. This would be the best one to use as a test environment because the difference would be most noticeable. For further information, contact a local reseller that knows the ins and outs of networking and can determine if this is an appropriate service for you.

Want to find out more about Internet application acceleration, then visit Rolf Versluis’s site on how to choose the best network optimization for your needs.

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Filed under storage by Rolf Versluis on Jul 1st, 2010.

How To Get Faster Application Performance Over The Internet

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