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F E A T U R E

AppCelera Burns Up the Last Mile

November 26, 2001
By Lori MacVittie


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Packeteer AppCelera ICX-75s

The Packeteer AppCelera ICX-75s was deployed and running 10 minutes after we unboxed it, and its Web-based configuration made setting up acceleration a breeze. The AppCelera provides its speed enhancements through a combination of text and image compression as well as variant caching, which is the process of storing compressed and transformed content for future use. The ICX-75s' SSL support via embedded Broadcom Corp. technology provides a boost to secured content as well.

The ICX-75s enabled acceptable performance increases in our tests. Baseline tests gave us an average of 458 seconds to download 92 KB in images; the ICX-75s compressed that total to 30 KB with a transfer time of less than 130 seconds. Still sounds painful, but recall that our bandwidth was a mere 14.4 Kbps! Text-compression rates were good, dropping 8 KB of text to 3 KB.

The ICX-75s can be configured to perform only optimization and compression for low-speed connections. The device determines the speed of the connection. You can ignore LAN speeds, because the ICX-75s actually adds latency to the transfer time for speeds greater than 10 Mbps. If you don't trust this technology, which is unique to this product, you can force the ICX-75s to treat all connections as slow.

Support for Flash compression is also unique to the ICX-75s, which handles optimization for JavaScript, CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), WML and XML in addition to HTML. The products we tested that performed optimization generally handled at least WML, XML and HTML (BoostWorks' and Redline Networks' products can optimize these data types); Redline also handles cHTML (Compact HTML).

Like Redline's TX 2100, the ICX-75s attempts to help out the Web server by multiplexing TCP connections on the back end. The "multiplexing" feature of many networking devices means that the device maintains a number of open connections to Web servers and reuses the connections to process HTTP requests. Because the ICX-75s and TX 2100 maintain a configurable number of connections to the Web server at all times, the Web server can concentrate its processing time on serving up pages rather than setting up and tearing down TCP connections.

Average Download Time (chart)

Click here to enlarge

The ICX-75s handles a wide variety of browsers and bases its decisions to optimize and compress based solely on the "accept" header sent by the browser. We tested with Netscape Navigator 4.7 and Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE) 5.5, as well as Konqueror on Linux, and had no problem retrieving pages. In the big scheme of things, no matter the browser, the device should return content, even if it is not optimized or compressed. Like the TX 2100 and BoostWeb, the ICX-75s scored well on this point.

The ICX-75s bills itself as a "zero point of failure" device. If the software running in the appliance fails, the device reverts to bridging mode. If the hardware fails (or is turned off), the box becomes nothing more than an expensive wire. This ensures that, short of unplugging the device, access to your site can't be blocked by the ICX-75s. In contrast, both BoostWorks' and FineGround's products are potential points of failure in the network topology.

AppCelera ICX-75s, $18,000. Available: Now. Packeteer, (408) 873-4400; fax (408) 873-4410. www.packeteer.com

BoostWorks BoostWeb

One of two software-based products in our review (Fourelle's Venturi is the other), BoostWorks' BoostWeb performed like a champ. Once we got past the odd nomenclature used in configuration of the software and had BoostWeb up and running, it did great things for our transfer times. Our 92 KB of images became 5 KB, and transfer time dropped from 458 seconds to 36 seconds. Text compression dropped our original 8 KB to 3 KB -- results identical to those of the ICX-75s and TX 2100, not surprising since all the text compression offerings are based on gzip or Unix compression formats. Like that of Fourelle's Venturi, BoostWeb's image compression is configurable -- you determine how much of a loss you will accept on JPEG images.

Because BoostWeb is a proxy-based technology, it can be configured to work in conjunction with other proxies quite easily (including other BoostWeb boxes). The pricing of BoostWeb kept it out of the top spot: At $10,000 per CPU, it could become an expensive solution when compared with the affordable $18,000 ICX-75s.

BoostWeb handles XML and HTML and supports a wide array of server operating systems, including Hewlett-Packard HP-UX, Linux, Microsoft Windows NT/2000 and Sun Microsystems Solaris. Sorry, Novell NetWare enthusiasts -- neither of the software products we tested supports any version of NetWare.

Also, unlike the ICX-75s and FineGround Networks' Condenser, BoostWeb can't handle SSL. Version 4.0 will offer the capability to tunnel HTTPS (HTTP Secure): It will pass SSL traffic through to the server, but for BoostWeb to accelerate SSL traffic, additional hardware or software will be required.

BoostWeb, $10,000 per processor. Available: Now. BoostWorks, (415) 546-9100; fax (415) 546-9109. www.boostworks.com