Belgian Papers Speed Web Traffic

Belgian publishing company S.A. IPM has boosted the Website performance of the countrys top national newspapers, La Dernière Heure and La Libre Belgique, by deploying Web acceleration technology from Redline Networks Inc. in its data center.

With around 20,000 unique visitors a day, the Websites need to be robust enough to cope with significant demand. But prior to deploying the Web acceleration processor late last year, both were struggling to support the volume of traffic and page hits they were receiving.

The problem was caused by a bottleneck around a database server, which was being bombarded with concurrent processes from the firm’s Apache Web servers. This slowed down response times and limited site availability, which is a massive problem for any company in the business of providing up-to-the-minute news.

Although not exactly a case for Belgian super-sleuth Hercule Poirot, the situation needed to be resolved. Luxembourg-based Web development and consulting company VAlain S.A. duly examined the problem and proposed Redline’s T/X2200 Web I/O processor as the solution.

The processor, which went live in January, has already slashed homepage download times, according to VAlain. It now takes a user between five and seven seconds to download a homepage at peak times, whereas previously it would have taken around a minute.Although IPM was unavailable for comment on the specifics behind the project, Patrick de Lannoy, the company’s multimedia manager, confirmed in a press statement that the new technology is delivering results. He says “We can now deliver business continuity and performance for our online services at a fraction of the cost and effort that would have been incurred by using conventional solutions to provide the same results.”

Firms across the globe are turning to a range of data center technologies to ensure that their sites stay up and running. Last week, Mexico’s OCC Mundial, one of Latin America’s busiest job sites, announced that it had deployed application switches from NetScaler Inc. in its U.S data center.

OCC Mundial’s application switches are being used for load balancing across its servers and for protection against dreaded denial-of-service attacks.

— James Rogers, Site Editor, Next-gen Data Center Forum