pronounced for end users with slow or high latency connections. Additional application logic can also
be implemented by edge servers, such as authentication or serving different versions of a page based on attributes of the client. More details of this are covered in Section 7.1. Note that the path and protocol optimizations here accelerate communications in both directions and are therefore ideal for content uploads as well as downloads. Moreover, they are not limited to Web-based applications Akamai uses similar technologies to accelerate other IP-based enterprise applications such as interactive Web conferencing,
virtualized applications (
i.e., running over Citrix ICA or Microsoft RDP protocols, large file transfers over SFTP or SSH,
and email, as well as other enterprise applications delivered via SSL VPN. Finally, it is important to realize that the highly distributed nature of the Akamai network is key to the efficacy of the overlay network because the endpoints of the highly optimized long-haul tunnel are located very close to the origin and the end user. This means virtually the entire communication from origin to end user is optimized, and the brief hops on either end are extremely low latency due to the short distance. In practice, this makes for good long-distance performance—for
large files, for example, origin server downloads that go over the high performance overlay can perform nearly as well as files delivered from cache because the overlay is able to deliver the file from origin to edge server as quickly as the edge server can deliver to the end user.
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