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Content Delivery Networks Explained | Object Cache Explained
In the digital era, where speed and performance are crucial for user experience and search engine rankings, two technologies often come into play: Content Delivery Networks (CDN) and Object Caches. While both are designed to enhance website performance, they serve different purposes and work in distinct ways. In this blog post, we’ll explore CDN and Object Cache, helping you decide which is best suited for your website’s needs.
What is a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
A content delivery network (CDN) is a network of servers strategically distributed across multiple geographic locations with the goal of delivering web content more quickly and efficiently to users. The servers in a CDN are interconnected to form a large global network. When a user requests a web page, the domain name system (DNS) routes the request to the CDN instead of the origin server. The CDN will then redirect the request to the edge server that is closest to that user. This is determined based on metrics like geographic proximity and server load.
Serving content from the nearest edge location significantly reduces latency and round trip times. Rather than traveling long distances back to the origin server, content is delivered from a local server nearby. This results in a dramatic improvement in website and content loading speeds.
CDNs also reduce the workload and bandwidth usage on origin servers by distributing requests across the edge servers. This allows the CDN to handle spikes in traffic without overload. It also improves website reliability and uptime.
The distributed nature of a CDN provides other benefits like:
- Improved security – Increased DDoS protection and web application firewalls
- Dynamic content caching – Can cache dynamic content in some cases
- Load balancing – Automatically distributes traffic across healthy servers
- Failover – Servers back each other up if one goes down
Major CDN providers include Cloudflare, Akamai, Amazon CloudFront, and Fastly. Most websites can benefit from using a CDN, especially sites serving large global audiences. Implementing a CDN is one of the most effective optimizations for improving website speed and scalability.
Key Benefits of CDN:
- Faster Content Delivery – By serving content from the nearest server, CDNs reduce latency and improve page load times.
- Scalability – CDNs can handle traffic spikes efficiently, making them ideal for websites with variable traffic.
- Reduced Bandwidth Costs – CDNs can reduce the amount of data an origin server must provide, lowering hosting costs.
- Improved Security – CDNs often include security features like DDoS protection and data encryption.
What is Object Cache
Object caching, also known as fragment caching, is a technique for caching and reusing pieces of dynamically generated web content. It serves cached copies of content when possible instead of regenerating the content on each request.For example, on a news website the latest article listings on the homepage are typically generated dynamically on each page load. This requires querying the database, running business logic, and rendering templates on every request.
With object caching, these rendered article listings can be cached as HTML fragments for a configured time. When a homepage request comes in, the cache is checked first. If a fresh copy of the listings exists, they are served directly from the cache. Only when the cache expires is the content regenerated. This avoids redundant generation of repeat content. By serving cached copies, object caching reduces trips to the database, CPU usage, and server response times. It decreases server load while increasing site speed and capacity.
Common cached objects include:
- Fragments of rendered HTML
- API responses and JSON data
- Database query results
- Output of business logic functions
Most modern web frameworks provide built-in object caching systems. Cache times are configurable based on the dynamics of the data. More static content can be cached longer. Intelligent use of object caching is a key technique for improving performance of database-driven websites and APIs. It reduces costly redundant operations and allows servers to handle more traffic.
Key Benefits of Object Cache
- Reduced Server Load – Caching frequent database queries decreases the load on the server.
- Faster Response Times – Data retrieval from cache is quicker than querying a database, speeding up website performance.
- Improved User Experience – A faster website provides a better experience for the end-user.
- Efficient Resource Utilization – Caching optimizes the use of server resources, enhancing overall website efficiency.
CDN or Object Cache: Which One Should You Choose
If your website serves a high volume of multimedia content like images, videos, audio, ebooks, and PDFs, a CDN can provide major benefits. CDNs are designed to distribute large static files efficiently on a global scale. By caching content on edge servers nearest end users, a CDN minimizes the travel distance for these beefy files. This significantly cuts down on load times. It also reduces strain on the origin servers. A CDN is especially impactful for sites with a worldwide audience accessing bandwidth-heavy content. Media websites, e-commerce product images, software and game downloads greatly benefit from a CDN’s geographic reach.
Websites, mobile apps and APIs that rely heavily on database operations can gain major speed and efficiency improvements from object caching. Rather than hitting backend databases on every request, reusable data like listings, comments, search results, and API responses can be cached. This avoids expensive queries and processing that eat up server resources. Sites like news portals, social networks, CRMs, travel sites, and other database-driven applications are good candidates for object caching. It’s also very applicable for public and internal APIs by caching endpoint responses.
Evaluate your specific architecture – if you serve large media files globally, lean towards a CDN. If your site is database intensive, object caching will likely have a bigger impact. Maximizing both is ideal for complex sites.
Using CDN and Object Cache Together
In many cases, using a content delivery network (CDN) and object caching together can provide the best of both worlds for improving website performance. A CDN is ideal for caching and distributing static assets like images, CSS files, and JavaScript. It stores these files in edge servers around the globe, providing faster access by serving them from a nearby location. This takes pressure off the origin server. However, a CDN won’t cache dynamic content – that’s where object caching comes in.
An object cache sits in front of the application server, storing dynamic content for a configurable time. Common cached data includes HTML fragments, API responses, and database query results. So while the CDN optimizes delivery of static files, the object cache accelerates dynamic requests and database load. The cache avoids redundant requests by serving cached copies first. This reduces expensive regenerating of dynamic content.
Together, a CDN and object cache can optimize both static and dynamic content delivery:
- The CDN distributes static assets globally, providing fast access near users. This improves page load speed.
- The object cache minimizes duplicate dynamic requests to the application server. This reduces server load and database queries.
- Together they significantly improve overall website performance, user experience, and scalability.
Using a layered caching approach allows each system to focus on what it does best – CDNs for static files, and object caching for dynamic content. While some overlap can occur, the combined benefits typically outweigh any duplication. Proper configuration is important to maximize efficiency gains. Set optimal cache expiration times, selectively cache page fragments, and exclude non-cacheable requests. Done right, implementing a CDN and object cache together can supercharge website speed and capability.
Conclusion
Both CDNs and Object Caches are powerful tools that can help improve the performance and scalability of a modern website. Choosing between them will depend on the specific needs of your website and its audience. Regardless, working with an expert can help companies make the right choice and ensure that it is set up and maintained correctly for optimal performance.
Web Experts has installed countless CDNs and Object Caches on websites and applications of all types. We can help assess a website’s needs and recommend the best solution for improving performance. Reach out to our Web Experts, and we can ensure your website or mobile app is being delivered to users at the top speed.
