Pivia pushes performance

When I see a phrase like “smart optimizations” applied to the topic of Web applications delivery I have to take notice.

This phrase is used by Pivia (see editorial links below) to describe what its Pivia Performance Suite does. The company’s approach to improving the performance of Web page delivery is by optimizing “the end-to-end user experience measured by how quickly full pages and documents are downloaded and rendered by a browser,” Pivia says.

The core idea is to reduce the number of transactions with the client as well as with the application server that are required to fulfill a request. The server also attempts to service individual browser requests in parallel using multiple connections, offloads Secure Sockets Layer support, and maintains both browser and edge caches for static and dynamic content.

In addition to those techniques, Pivia’s “Application Smart” allows modified Web applications to tell the Pivia server when dynamic content is out of date and needs to be reloaded into cache. This is a powerful technique because it ensures that updated content is available to browsers as soon as it’s created by the Web application.

The entire Application Smart functionality is transparent to browsers with one exception: everything appears as much as five or six times faster in the browser. That is an ideal exception.

Pivia also offers a Remote Edition of its server that provides the same services but at a remote site, which would produce significant performance improvements for branch offices or as part of a data center edge service architecture.

For Plumtree users, Pivia sells its Pivia Performance Server Plumtree Edition that “improves the performance and reduces the costs of Plumtree deployments without any code changes,” according to Pivia.

Running on off-the-shelf server hardware, the Pivia Performance Suite starts at $50,000.