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August 16, 1999

Network Pressure

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Illustration by August Stein

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So Dee is trying a new tactic: offloading encryption processing from the commerce servers. Setting up a secure, or encrypted, connection to process an E-commerce transaction is a common feature on Web sites today. But establishing encrypted connections can hurt performance. Dee estimates that every time a server uses HTTPS, a protocol for accessing a secure Web server, to process an encrypted transaction, the server's processor is 10 times more active than when it's simply processing requests using HTTP.

To improve performance, 1-800-Flowers is using a Commerce Accelerator from IPivot to intercept requests for secured connections before they reach the commerce server. The $12,995 device then establishes the connection and encrypts the traffic using HTTPS or Secure Sockets Layer, another security protocol, freeing up commerce server resources for processing transactions or providing requested information.

Another technique for ensuring that certain customers get good service, even when a site is overwhelmed with traffic, is policy networking. "Until now, we've been able to afford outages--we haven't liked them, but we could handle them," says John Dodds, a senior systems administrator at Financialweb.com Inc. in Orlando, Fla., which provides a variety of financial information on its Web site. That attitude changed in July when the company launched an E-commerce application that pushes real-time stock quotes and other financial data to paying subscribers. "Now it's absolutely critical to be up 100% of the time," Dodds says. "We have some real-time traders as customers, and for some of them, just a five-second delay can amount to 15% profit or 15% loss."

Dodds' goal is to ensure that paying customers have server resources available to them regardless of how many nonpaying visitors are accessing information from Financialweb.com's systems. To accomplish that, the company has implemented a policy-based network that can prioritize certain customer traffic over others using "application-aware" switches from Alteon Inc. that recognize specific types of traffic and applications. The switches give priority to all traffic that's encrypted, which comes from paying customers who have secure connections between their PCs and the Financialweb.com servers. In addition, subscribers to its Premium Professional services will have priority over other paying subscribers, letting Financialweb.com set up multiple levels of service for different customers.

For some E-commerce site operators, speed is just as important as availability. Losing a customer because a page takes too long to load is no different than losing one because a commerce site is unavailable. "We're always trying to increase the speed of delivery of our content," says Motley Fool's Gibbs.

The traditional--and costly--solution to that problem has been to add more bandwidth to the network. If a 56-Kbps line is overloaded, upgrade to a T1 (1.5-Mbps) line; if the T1 fills up, add another one or two, or jump to a T3 (45-Mbps) connection. However, that approach can be expensive; a T1 line typically costs around $1,500 a month, while a T3 line can cost $20,000 a month.

But more bandwidth doesn't solve all problems when it comes to E-commerce because bigger pipes can't overcome performance bottlenecks caused by the Internet itself. "Much of the delay in getting content to our customers is latency in the Internet," Gibbs says. "It just takes a long time to get through all the router hops."

That's why some companies are trying to put frequently accessed data closer to users, especially bandwidth-intensive content. For example, Infoseek Corp., an Internet information, search, and commerce site, found that graphical data stored on its commerce servers was slowing the online-purchasing process.

"Anything that's offered for sale on our site is going to have some kind of visual element to it," says Infoseek CIO David Chamberlain. "Whether it's a bouquet of flowers or an antique dresser, customers are going to want to look at images of it, comparedifferent sizes, and examine the front and back and bottom."

Infoseek and companies such as the Motley Fool and CNN are putting graphical images on servers distributed throughout a caching network maintained by Akamai or by competitors such as Sandpiper Networks Inc. and Inktomi Corp. When an Infoseek customer is browsing merchandise, images of the products will be provided by an Akamai server that's closest to the customer or by one that has the clearest path to the customer. When the transaction is ready to be placed, the customer will be connected directly to an Infoseek server. Chamberlain estimates that the technique boosts download speeds by 20%.

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