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BSA Infrastructure Upgrade

During the past few weeks we have been working to upgrade two important pieces of BSA infrastructure: DNS and our CDN (content delivery network). These upgrades are very important for all of our publishers and to us as a company. We’re geeks, we like when things are *fast*, and we’re dedicated to speed. With the help of some experts and friends we were able to make a seamless transition on both fronts.

CDN

NetDNA is now our Tier 1 Content Delivery Network. They are all about speed and efficiency, and helped us craft a new approach to our ad delivery methods.

DNS

We have upgraded to the Dynect Platform. This is the same caliber stuff used by top companies like Twitter, 37Signals, and EdgeCast: http://dynect.com/casestudies/. Here is a look at their coverage map:
dynectcoveragemap

The combination of both upgrades has, so far, resulted in BSA being almost twice as fast. These are initial numbers from the past few weeks, and we’re still working on additional improvements and optimizations. Here’s a look at our reports from a 3rd party source – Pingdom.com:

Ad Server:
responsetime

Stats:
responsetime2

Special Thanks

These efforts would not have been possible without the help from Chris Ueland of NetDNA & his team, and Frederick Townes of W3 EDGE. Special thanks to those guys.

  • http://w3-edge.com Frederick Townes

    Great work Todd! The proof is in the pudding right there!

  • http://www.iconfinder.net Martin Leblanc

    Great!

    When are you moving to the CDN-network?

    You should also look into using gzip before transfering the banners. They are not compressed at the moment and could lower load times and you bandwidth bill.

    Best regards,
    Martin Leblanc

    • http://buysellads.com Todd Garland

      Hi Martin, we made the move to the CDN a few weeks ago. We don’t gzip images because they are already compressed. From some experts over at Yahoo! “Image and PDF files should not be gzipped because they are already compressed. Trying to gzip them not only wastes CPU but can potentially increase file sizes.” http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html (look under the “Gzip Components” section). However, that doesn’t mean that we do not have something in the works to further optimize images automatically for advertisers – it’s just not gzipping.

      • http://www.iconfinder.net Martin Leblanc

        Ok, sounds great. I actually used ySlow to detect that they weren’t gzipped.

        Keep up the good work.

      • http://rtcamp.com Rahul Bansal

        Compressing binary/or non-plaintext data is never a good idea.
        I assume you guys are using yahoo’s smushit http://www.smushit.com/ysmush.it/ to atleast reduce size of images being served.

  • John Smith

    So are you using NetDNA or MaxCDN for your CDN Needs?