F5 Networks’ BIG-IP summary

F5’s market-leading BIG-IP turned in a solid performance, reducing response time under load and supporting large numbers of concurrent users (see scalability test results). The BIG-IP might have done even better in our HTTP goodput tests had we tested with more than 100 users. Goodput is defined as the amount of data received minus any data lost or retransmitted.

The BIG-IP uses a dedicated hardware card for HTTP compression, helping it deliver roughly the same benefits in response-time savings with 12,000 users as with 1,000 users (see service-testing results). Further, the BIG-IP’s TCP multiplexing ratio was the third highest we observed, at least when clients used a 60-second think time. However, multiplexing was virtually nonexistent when we used a 3-second think time, suggesting that this feature may be sensitive to user access rate.