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One person accessing data from "origin" is faster then getting it from the "cdn" but the cacheing lets you leverage bandwidth. Instead of building 100gbps of ca
by Dobbs 14y ago
One person accessing data from "origin" is faster then getting it from the "cdn" but the cacheing lets you leverage bandwidth. Instead of building 100gbps of capacity I can instead build a origin server with 5gbps of capacity and let the CDN do the heavy lifting.
If every user where to go around the cdn then the site would break.
- udpheaders 14y agoWhat's good for the server isn't always good for the client. If you're running a site, CDN's sound great. If you're an internet user, CDN's might not always be so welcome. But if CDN's didn't work pretty good from the client's perspective, if they didn't generally speed things up for most users, sites would not use them. So they do work pretty good, in general. But there are exceptions. At a certain point, when you are getting enough traffic to "break" the site, then it makes sense to move the data closer to the edge. A data center or even at the ISP. And that's exactly what we see big sites doing. I'm not so sure every site using a CDN is in that category though. Some might just be trying to save a few bucks on bandwidth. Others might lack the know-how to run a high traffic site. Some sites I see on Akamai just use them for their www subdomain that gets used in links from articles in other high volume sites. Meanwhile the same content is on the host (sans www). If we move all data from all sites to the edge of the network, then sure, things will be faster, in general. I'm OK with that. Then maybe the internet gets more use as a communication channel than as a distribution channel for commercial content: a global TV network.