Blueflame lights fire under Web performance
A diamond in the rough, Fireclick's Blueflame software improves Web performance.
In the pursuit to improve the "Web experience" comes Fireclick Blue-flame 1.0, a software-based Web performance enhancement utility designed to improve user performance by utilizing the clients' and the Web server's existing unused bandwidth potential.
Blueflame, which sits next to the Web server on a host's network, improves performance by being proactive in downloading content to a user's browser. Rather than waiting for the user to click on the next logical link, Blueflame preloads content to the browser's cache while the user is reading the current page. So when the user clicks on the next link, the page elements come from the browser's cache where Blueflame has already loaded them, not from across the Web.
This means increased customer satisfaction, fewer abandoned shopping carts and prolonged browsing sessions for Web site owners and e-commerce shops - all the things your Web site relies on to generate revenue.
Blueflame is a reverse proxy server that accelerates the end users' Web experience. It performs a real-time, click-stream analysis of the predominant usage paths on a Web server to determine which elements to download to the users' cache.
This is done by understanding usage paths on an element-by-element basis. Blueflame doesn't need to predict what page a user will go to. If there are 14 possible links on a page and 10 of those have the same logo or picture, the software will download that image because the user will likely need it regardless of which page he selects.
Blueflame uses the available bandwidth on the client side, in addition to the unused bandwidth and server-side resources of the Web server, to accelerate the end-user experience. Web site managers appropriate bandwidth for peak traffic, but because a Web site is typically running at 20% to 40% of capacity in a normal scenario, you're likely to hit those peaks only once or twice a day.
Blueflame uses the available bandwidth that companies are already paying for to predownload content to users. As peak traffic times arise, Blueflame will reduce the amount of predownloading it does. And as peaks subside, it will more aggressively predownload content. This is configured through the Blueflame Web-based configuration applet.
Implementing Blueflame
Fireclick recommends that Blueflame run on a dedicated Windows NT or Sun Microsystems Solaris machine. We placed our Blueflame server behind a Cisco LocalDirector load balancer. The load balancer directs Web traffic to the Blueflame server. In the event of a Blueflame server failure, the LocalDirector would redirect the traffic to the live Web site. This is the fail-safe configuration, but a redirector is not required.
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On the user side, the only thing a user notices is an increase in speed for Blueflame-accelerated Web sites. The client component is a small, transparent Java applet. Users must have Java enabled on their browser to take advantage of Blueflame acceleration. Users without a Java-enabled browser will still be able to see Blueflame accelerated sites, but at normal speed.
We found Blueflame to be a little rough around the edges especially in the areas of configuration and management. We called technical support after installing the product because we thought it had hung the NT server. It turned out to be working fine - there just wasn't any acknowledgement of whether the Blueflame engine applications were alive.
Blueflame includes two console applications that launch the product, both of which must be started individually. These applications start up as DOS boxes on the NT server and offer little meaningful information to administrators. A third configuration application must be launched to enable the Web-based configuration applet, which then displays traffic activity on your site, along with display and read times.
However, we found it difficult to translate the numbers into meaningful results. After any configuration change, we had to manually terminate the DOS boxes so we could shut down Blueflame, then restart each one individually from the Blueflame menu.
Despite the rough edges, we consider Blueflame a gem because it gets the acceleration job done. We set up the product in about 30 minutes, accelerating a test Web site and gathering statistics.
Because Blueflame learns about user patterns over time and becomes more efficient, the more traffic the site gets, the faster it learns about the predominant paths. During the course of one week, we tested the performance gains offered by Blueflame on our test site and noted a gradual increase.
One page took 15 seconds to complete on the first attempt and about seven seconds after a week's time. Different pages experienced different levels of acceleration in our tests, with a total average performance increase of 42% over the one-week period. Your results will vary depending on such things as content, usage and available bandwidth.
Will Blueflame's technology improve the Web experience for your Web site users? Definitely yes. The use of cache for memory, processor and hard drive performance enhancement is a long-proven technology, so applying a similar technology to Web site performance makes a lot of sense.
Will it make your Web business more profitable? If end-user performance is the hurdle you need to gain profitability, Blueflame provides an excellent answer.
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