4 Reasons Why Your CDN Still Works Slowly

A CDN (content delivery network) is a technology that makes web page loading faster, but there are some factors that slow down your applications or website despite using such a network. If you are considering using a CDN, or have already implemented it, here are four things that you should settle up to achieve better performance.

Do you have enough hardware resources?

Although CDN offloads traffic from the origin server, your hardware may be not enough to provide sufficient speed even though it is lightened. If you observe usage spikes of CPU and RAM, it’s time to upgrade hardware resources. By the way, CPU spikes and leaks of memory can be caused by software bugs or misconfigurations. Ensure that you have the latest patches of OS and software, and check server configurations.

Problems of Network

Accidents can cause serious delays on several routes. Despite being a reliable and helpful, CDN cannot do anything with server’s ISP and prevent bandwidth bottleneck. Internet outages can be conditioned by natural disasters, DDoS attack, stealing and damage of optic cables, hardware outage and issues with ISP routing.

Third party objects

Today, sites often use objects from third parties: JavaScript, analytic tools, and media files, which helps to cut expenses. But CDN accelerates only what comes from your server, not third party servers. If such objects comprise more than 30% of page, improvement from CDN won’t be so considerable. The more third part objects are used, the less CDN effect is observed.

Inaccurate cache settings

The more objects from a web-site can be cached, the higher CDN benefits are. Mind that some objects, such as scripts and html files cannot be cached as they should be updated often, and you can set sow cache frequency for them. However, objects that do not change (static content) should be cached properly to optimize CDN use. Watch for cache control age: if it expires, the next request will get back to server instead of CDN’s edge.

CDN can help to solve most problems that solve slow speed of websites and applications, but some factors cannot be controlled with this technology. Watch for these four possible reasons for slow performance, and don’t let them spoil your CDN’s potential.