Online visitors are a finicky bunch - not to mention impatient. Studies have shown Web visitors will abandon a site in just seconds if performance is subpar.

Business performance begins to suffer after 5.1 seconds of delay in the response times of Web applications, according to research from Aberdeen Group. An additional 1-second delay in response times can impact customer satisfaction by up to 16% and impact conversions by up to 7%, the firm says.

As the 2008 election season drew near, MoveOn.org knew it would be a challenge keeping performance where it needed to be. The political activist group decided to upgrade its application acceleration and load balancing technology to support the anticipated huge growth in Web server traffic.

MoveOn.org stayed with its existing provider, Coyote Point Systems, and last summer became the first customer to deploy the vendor’s new Equalizer GX family of application acceleration and load balancing appliances (formally launched in January).

SSL performance was a key requirement, since MoveOn.org processes online donations -- not only for political groups but also for other nonprofit organizations, says Patrick Kane, system architect for MoveOn.org. The 5-million-member group, established in 1998, didn’t want to leave anything to chance.

“This is a lesson that we learned the hard way, when MoveOn was much younger. One of the things that originally led us to deploy the first round of Coyote Point devices was that we were just getting hammered on SSL,” recalls Kane.

Coyote Point’s E450GX appliances offload the SSL processing from Web servers. With dedicated Xcel SSL hardware acceleration, the E450GX was designed to maximize application performance in SSL-secured environments, and it can process up to 8,500 HTTPS transactions per second, according to Coyote Point.

The gear also helps MoveOn.org ride out traffic peaks.

“MoveOn is probably one of the spikiest groups that I’ve ever worked with,” Kane says. “When there’s a hot issue, or something for the MoveOn membership to take action on, we can go from a couple hundred people who are just visiting the site to all of sudden thousands or tens of thousands of people showing up at the door. Dealing with those spikes is one of our big concerns.”

Ann Bednarz is associate news editor at Network World.