Some iRule Editor Nostalgia

While walking past a bookshelf in my office, I caught a glimpse of something shiny. What was that?

Well, it was this. The “iRuler v1.0” disk. Not many folks know that the iRule Editor was humorously called the “iRuler” in it’s early days by creator Joe Pruitt. In classic F5 (and Pruitt) form, he showed up one day and said, “hey guys – what do you think of this?”.

Suffice it to say that after many enhancements and literally tens of thousands of downloads, it’s a big part of the F5 DevCentral journey and has certainly had a profound impact on the thousands of users writing and deploying iRules around the world.

Anyone want the master? It might be a nice collectible for that iRule addict in the community that has the have EVERYTHING iRule! Tell me why you should have it (in the comments below) and if your story is good enough, I might send it to you!

Get Learned: 4 Minutes on IPv4 / IPv6 from Interop

For those interested, there’s a great series of videos cropping up as the Interop folks and vendors begin staging infrastructure to support the event (starting 10-May in Las Vegas). The latest takes on the issues with IPv6 and includes a nice cameo by one of our favorite, highly-talented tech stars… BIG-IP!

Some good stuff with that helps those not in the know about IPv6 “get learned” in just over 4 minutes. Check it.

Just wrapped up a great session with the F5/Microsoft team discussing Microsoft Lync Server and designing deployments for optimal availability and scale. As companies start to deal with the major wave of mobile/remote workers (in one report, IDC suggests that 75% of the U.S. workforce will be mobile in coming years – I think that’s high but I doubt few argue it’s a legitimate trend), Lync seems to pose some nice enhancements and quite possibly a better, more centralized (i.e. IT desired!) approach to support mobile workers vs. the many free IP-based tools users could begin using out of necessity (i.e. something IT doesn’t likey…)

If you missed it, you can replay the Ustream presentation below.

For those curious about how an F5 customer has deployed OCS 2007 R2 with F5 gear, you can here’s a great article to read.

You might also like to check out F5’s tested and documented Deployment Guide for Lync Server.

Finally, if you use F5 and Microsoft products together, you really need to join the Microsoft/F5 Solutions Group. You can post questions, keep current on tips and updates about these combined technologies, and connect with others in the DevCentral community deploying similar solutions.

DevCentral upgrade… with a few hitches

With the rapid growth of DevCentral, we continue to get great suggestions for how we can improve the site (BTW – you too can provide suggestions via the Feedback form here). We also have a nonstop stream of ideas about cool stuff we would like to see as well. All of this means that we’ve become more dedicated to regular updates/upgrades to DevCentral, in both the software we use AND the customization we build on top of it. As a result, you may have seen a few more maintenance pages over the past few months than usual. If you’re interested in what we’ve been doing, read on!

The Updates

Yesterday, we ran our second update in the past couple months. For this update, our major focus was on streamlining performance at the application layer. By all measures, the upgrade went smoothly. Just a few things we focused on included:

• Removing unused features/functionality: we’re constantly messing around with new features. Often, they don’t see the light of day. So, to stay lean and mean, we removed some clutter to make replication smaller and less complicated.
• Registration process simplification: we’ve had some feedback that the registration process and form were just a bit long. So, we’ve shortened this and hopefully new members will be able to register faster. Less time, faster access to the good stuff.
• Reducing calls out to external services: in today’s web app world, it’s scarily easy to add objects to application skins that call out to the latest widget or script hosted elsewhere on the web. However, do you need to be able to “Add This!” to 3,562 different social sites on the web? No – we doubt it so we removed it.
• Group enhancements: Groups have really taken off in the community. And, we keep tweaking and improving them. While nothing immediately viewable, we’ve done some stuff that lays the groundwork for continued expansion of how you can benefit from Groups on DevCentral. Let’s just say that while not apparent now, we think you’ll like what you see in some future updates.
• There’s more stuff… but this gives you the feel of what we do, as part of a continued roadmap, to continue to evolve and improve DevCentral.

After working through development over the past month or so as well as our usual Staging/QA process, we pushed the button yesterday and rolled out the updates. However, it wasn’t until later in the day that things got a little bit interesting…

… and the Hitches

Without going into the gory details (we’ll probably do that later as it’s probably interesting to some of you), we run our application in redundant datacenters behind a whole host of F5 gear (GTM, LTM, WA, ASM). We use iRules extensively. We’re sort of biased but we think F5 gear rocks (and it would be lame if we didn’t use it extensively…).

As part of our infrastructure, our IT team manages a pretty extensive monitoring system to help us know what’s happening with our application, servers, and the infrastructure. Around 5pm (PST) yesterday, we started getting some funky alerts. Nothing serious but enough to be monitored more closely. Eventually, through F5 health monitors on LTM and GTM, we were able to flop datacenters automagically to keep users connecting to the application. All good.

But, in email to MVP and other active users, we learned that all was not completely ideal…

Jeff: “Hey – we’re seeing some funky alerts about the application. What are you seeing?”

DevCentral Member: “I was getting TCP resets consistently tonight. The IP seemed to respond very consistently to pings. So I was guessing it was an app layer issue.”

Hmmm. Thanks to our ninja IT team and the DC gang, we took some measures that seemed to resolve/stabilize things and we went to sleep. However, this morning, the issues reappeared and we dug deeper.

It turns out that the upgrade flipped a bit in the database that told certain scheduled jobs to run on multiple servers. Combine this with the fact that a couple of these jobs were pretty resource intensive and were running against very large tables, and you end up with some DB deadlocking.  Deadlocking is bad, and will drag a server to its knees quickly, even if not under load, let alone serving thousands of pages.

This took a while to find because the only symptom presenting itself was pegged CPUs on the DB systems. Fortunately we’ve got an ace team of infrastructure & app folks that work together quite well, so we were able to track this down quickly. It can’t be stressed enough here how important it is to have a combined team that can crack down on these kind of issues from both angles (infrastructure and application sides).

Once the bits were set back to the intended settings and centralized job scheduling for log and notification management was back in place, the issue went away completely, and it was back to business as usual.

What We Learned

This was a bit of a wild goose chase and it cropped up from a place we never would have expected. Nothing was changed in the app code surrounding the jobs that got flipped on universally. It was just a complication of the upgrade itself. A few thoughts we’ve come away from this with:

• Logging of various types is vital to any application, but can cause more headaches than most people realize if not carefully monitored.
• Running multiple application servers in front of a single database server creates an interesting situation wherein you can easily have multiple servers attempt to fire up the same thread within the DB … this is bad, generally speaking, and anything you can do to monitor for and/or prevent this is a good thing.
• To control this, it’s imperative that you tightly monitor your logging, cleanup and truncation processes. Space them appropriately, run them from a centralized source, etc. Also, after any upgrade this would be an excellent thing to add to your QA checklist, even if changes weren’t made to this portion of your app. It’s on our list now, that’s for sure. ;)
• It cannot be stressed enough how important it is to have a collaborative mindset between both development and operations. If you work in an org where ops and the apps teams work well together (like we do), cherish and protect it. If you don’t, you might want to consider trading some of your investment in technology for spending a little more time figuring out how you can work better with your peers.

So, there you have it – a little insight into what we’ve been up to. We believe this continued focus on enhancements will deliver an even better community resource for you. And – maybe you’ll even benefit a little from some of the lessons we learned from this most recent upgrade that help your next upgrade go more smoothly.

Talking Proxies

During the morning session, the group took a brief detour to hear about the history of the TMOS proxy architecture. Here, iRule architect and all-around guru "unRuley" (in red shirt) talks about TMOS and the infamous HudProxy. To his immediate right is Joe Pruitt and Jason Rahm.

DevCentral MVP Summit Underway

Wow - an action packed morning already. The DevCentral MVPs, the DevCentral Team, as well as some F5 experts we're fortunate to have with us are all in Chicago today to talk about F5 technology and learn, share, and have some fun together. We kicked off the day with a great challenge led by F5er "L4L7" and jumped into a deep-dive about F5 hardware. After a quick break, we're talking application security.

As we move along, we'll be posting updates including some details about the challenges (nothing like a little heathy competition, right?) as well as other insights. Stay tuned...

Lunch, the F5 Guy, and Cryptic Mac OS Shortcuts

My absolute favorite part of working on DevCentral is meeting and spending time with community members. The number of thoughtful, interesting, and just plain cool people I’ve met actively involved with DevCentral are just astounding. A great example is Henrik Gyllkrans who we recently interviewed in Stockholm (check out those awesome boots!)

Of course, right up at the top of the cool list are our DevCentral MVPs. These guys simply go above and beyond to make this community great and we jump at any opportunity to hang out with them.

So, it was quite a treat to have lunch yesterday with Nathan Abbott (aka “naladar”) who was visiting Seattle to sharpen his skills with some F5 training classes. If you haven’t read Nathan’s “The F5 Guy” blog, you should. His posts, based on his real world experiences with F5 (and other technologies) are top notch and they clearly straight from the IT trenches.

Shortly before Nathan, Colin, Joe and I headed up the hill from F5’s offices to Buckley’s Pub, we gave him a sneak peek at a secret little project we’ve been working on. I can’t go into details but from Nathan’s initial response, I think we’re on the right track.

(Note: I recently learned of Buckley’s “Bluecy Lucy” burger that is flat-out awesome. When I first tried it a few weeks back, I was skeptical. But, when one of the kind servers said, “umm…  it was better than I expected.”, I had to try it. Yesterday? No question. I didn’t even crack the menu. If you’re in the area, you should try it. Also, quick trivia tidbit – the glass building (in the link) to the right of Buckley’s was the original F5 HQ building, according to Joe.)

Anyways, back to the point. We had a great conversation with Nathan and it was just fun chatting about a bunch of stuff. With this being Nathan’s first visit to Seattle, we talked about some must-see things including the Space Needle, the EMP/SciFi Museum, the Pike Place Market, and more. We also had a hilarious talk about consumer technology – specifically the Mac. We (sshhh.. don’t tell anyone…) all joked at how Colin and Joe spent much longer than they’ll EVER admit trying to figure out how to eject a DVD from the Mac Pro workstation we use for video editing… (“dude – I can’t find the eject button! What the….”) And, Nathan triggered a hilarious follow up on the obscure shortcut combinations in the OS. Colin even added, “I don’t even know what that diagonal slash underscore character is… where’s that key anyway???!” “Yeah – could I borrow a couple extra fingers for the Apple+C+<bizarre_backslash>+… shortcut to eject my damn DVD?” You get the picture. We were all rolling.

All in all, a great time shared with Nathan. Thanks – again – Nathan for all that you do to make DevCentral a very unique and collaborative community.  And, if anyone out there is ever in Seattle for training or other events, let us know – we’d always enjoy meeting members of the community.

iRule. Do You? Winners Announced.

Congratulations to the 2009 iRule. Do You? winners! Compared to previous years, it is worth noting that the competition for top-spots in both the Customer and Partner divisions was incredibly tight. In fact, the community voting – a first for this contest – actually played a role in determining the final outcome (as it should, given how great this community is). So, while we have to crown top winners, everyone of the finalists really delivered spectacular iRules that demonstrate creativity and flair.

And, the winners are…

Customer Winners
1st     Chetan Bhatt (USA) – "Pool Member Status List"
2nd    Kris Weinhold (USA) – "Siteminder Authentication Rule (Login External, NTLM Internal)"
3rd    Jari Leppala (Finland) – "RTSP-Redirect"

F5 Partner Winners
1st    Sake Blok / Ion-IP (Netherlands) – "EncryptOutgoingSOARequest"
2nd   Henrik Gyllkrans / Advanced IP Scandinavia AB (Sweden) – "Cookie Tampering Prevention"
3rd    Levin Chen / Sinogrid Information Technology (China) – "iRules_deny_repeat_login_ok"

They have all selected the prizes from our list of options and will be receiving their goodies shortly. (surprise, surprise – anything Apple was a hit with MacBooks and Cinema Displays the collective choices!)

We want to thank ALL of the participants; this edition was more difficult than ever to judge due to the volume and quality of entries. There were some additional iRules – we call them “Honorable Mention” finalists – that didn’t make the top 6 but deserve recognition. So, check them out as well.

We want to acknowledge and thank all of our celebrity judges from Dr. Dobb’s, Dell’Oro Group, and Enterprise Strategy Group as well. Jon, Alan, and Jon each invested time and energy reviewing entries, offering their comments, all freely and simply at our asking. F5 and our community are fortunate they appreciate the spirit of DevCentral and I encourage you to visit their sites, blogs, and learn more about what they do. They are ALL top-notch in their respective fields and you will likely benefit from paying attention to what they say.

Special recognition goes to our F5 “guest guru” judge Kirk Bauer and the DevCentral guys as well. Kirk’s dedication – to spend hours judging in the wee hours of the morning just to make sure his work was done before leaving later that day for a long holiday vacation – is remarkable and embodies the F5 culture. The DevCentral guys also contributed as usual. I see the team everyday and they put tremendous thought and energy into helping make your community something that makes your life better, easier, and hopefully fun too.

In the end, I find it incredibly inspiring and humbling each time we do these contests. What captures the spirit of the contributors, and community best for me, are the comments 2nd Place Partner Henrik Gyllkrans made when he learned he had been selected one of the best. His sentiments unquestionable represent the collective attitude that makes the DevCentral community truly special:

“I’m proud and honored that my iRule was received so well by the judges. I hope this iRule can help organizations around the world to deliver better and more secure sites.”

With that said, congratulations to the winners. Jump on over to the 2009 iRule. Do You? contest section to learn more and check out some cool iRules!

Cast Your Vote for Best iRule for the 2009 Contest

After reviewing the flood of entries (thank you ALL!) in 2009 contest, we’re ready for what I’ve been most excited about: your chance to select the winner of this year’s iRule. Do You? contest.

If you want to skip the extra blabbering from me, you click here and vote!

Otherwise, here are some more details about the contest.

As you’ve probably noticed, we’re running a bit behind our original schedule. It’s directly due to the many entries and due diligence from our judging team to spend the necessary time reviewing the entries thoughtfully.

Special thanks go out to our Expert Panel of Judges for making time for the judging process:

• Jon Erickson, Editor-in-Chief of Dr. Dobb’s (www.drdobbs.com)
• Alan Weckel, Director, Ethernet Switch and Enterprise Telephony Market Research of Dell’ Oro Group (www.delloro.com)
• Jon Oltsik, Senior Analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group (www.enterprisestrategygroup.com)

They are all industry leaders that do great work in their respective fields so take a few minutes to check out what they do.

Additionally, thanks to our F5 Guest Judge, iRule Guru, and all-around great guy and community contributor, Kirk Bauer. To get an idea of his iRule chops, just check out the incredibly popular (and recently updated!) Proxy Pass iRule.

The iRules we reviewed were fantastic. Here are just a few of the comments from our judges about some of the iRules they reviewed:

“Nice solution to a growing problem. Video servers demand lots of bandwidth and this takes the load off.”

“Great internal use for iRules, and since SMB is used in any Microsoft shop, there may be some extensibility for other users.”

“Great integration to web authentication. Could be extended to other technologies beyond Siteminder.”

“I like the fact that iRules solved this challenging problem, and I think it was a great idea to do so…”

“Very original concept for a challenging problem, and quite a simple iRule to accomplish so much. Much cleaner than the alternative. I like it!”

“I really like this solution: it is the Election Hash iRule for load balancing proxies but with RTSP and using redirects so traffic doesn't flow through the LTM. Interesting and novel use of an iRule and I think it would be applicable to other similar streaming media solutions.”

“I love iRules that manipulate binary traffic and this one is very compact and functional.”

“This iRule is unquestionably valuable.”

“Fixing bugs in browsers with BIG-IP iRule insertions. You don't get much more cool than that, do you?”

Without question, this has been the best iRule contest yet, with many entrants, close competition at the highest levels, the VERY best part: you get to vote to! So, select your favorite iRule. You have until 12pm on Monday, November 2, 2009 to choose yours. Then, well add your votes to the overall selection process and announce our winners shortly!

Survey iPod Touch Winners + Thanks for the Fantastic Response

The 2009 DevCentral Community Survey wrapped up last Thursday and the volume of participation simply crushed all previous DevCentral surveys. With over 500 respondents from around the world, this survey provided some remarkable insight into who you are, what types of things you’d like to see in the future, as well as some things you NEVER want to see from F5. (note: I’m saving this for a future blog post of it’s own)

Over the coming weeks, I’ll be sharing some interesting stats with you about your community. Thanks to everyone for your great input, your candid comments, and your continued support. Without you, DevCentral simply wouldn’t exist as it does today. We take your feedback seriously. Look for some new features and programs to emerge over the next few months that will be a direct result of your ideas and requests.

But, enough with all of the fluffy community talk. I know what you really care about: who wins one of those 7 iPod Touches?

Without further delay, here are the lucky 7:

• claretian
• dlarsen
• Estradad
• rmcree
• chasecen
• mcharette
• glenmo

So, if you are one of these lucky folks, thanks for playing. Your iPod is on it’s way… Just be sure to subscribe to the Weekly Podcast and other videos on iTunes when you set it up.

Finally, thank you again to all of you who took time out of your busy day to help make DevCentral even better. Stay tuned – there are exciting things to come.

Note: survey winners were selected through the use of the www.random.org “True Random Number Generator”. We entered the total number of participants and generated 7 random numbers. For those of you that want to learn more about how they use atmospheric noise vs. pseudo-random algorithms as used in video games to create random numbers, please go here.

The List: iControl Languages, Libraries, and IDEs

Back in 2001 (wow – seems like yesterday!), F5 introduced the first-ever, open/Web services API for network devices called iControl. With it, it sparked a major shift in the way companies could look at integrating network devices with applications. Leading software vendors figured it out. And, thousands of companies since then have used iControl to build custom monitoring apps, management solutions that more closely fit their internal processes, and even automate some cool stuff including enabling applications to tell the network how to deliver them.

While all fine and dandy (and fun to be a part of personally), the most important decision and event was the willingness to embrace SOAP/XML. By doing this (kudos to Joe Pruitt, BTW, for this call… it wasn’t without some feisty internal debate, truth be told), it opened up API access to our gear from virtually any SOAP stack or development tool and language a customer or partner wanted to use.

Why so cool, you ask? It’s simple – you know Perl? Great. Use it. You don’t need to learn SNMP. Has your organization trained everyone to use Java as a standard app language? No worries – go for it. Same for Ruby, Python, C#, and more. And, even new scripting approaches like PowerShell.

By choosing an open standard, it opens the doors for any customer or vendor to use whatever they want without having to swallow yet another vendor-mandated technology just to make something work.

So, this brings me to the payoff. We get this question often: “what are the supported dev tools/languages/toolkits/etc for iControl?”

Well, here you have it. This is both the “F5-supported” stuff plus what we know folks in the community have used successfully. We’ll turn this into a wiki doc too, so that if you have something you’ve used successfully, you can post it as well. In the meantime, add yours to the comments below.

Go forth and build your apps for iControl your way. (looking for some examples? You can find a ton of them here for free in the Codeshare.)

Perl:

Library: SOAP::Lite (www.soaplite.com)

IDE's: ActivePerl, Eclipse EPIC Perl, Open Perl IDE, and others.

C#/VB/.NET:

Library: iControl Assembly for .Net (devcentral.f5.com/Default.aspx?tabid=68)

IDE's: Visual Studio 2003, VS 2005, VS 2008, VS 2010

PowerShell:

Library: iControl PowerShell Cmdlets (devcentral.f5.com/Default.aspx?tabid=71)

IDE's: PowerShell Console Host, PowerShell ISE, PowerGUI, Sapien PrimalScript, PowerShell Analyzer, PowerShell Plus, and various others.

Java:

Library: iControl Library for Java (devcentral.f5.com/Default.aspx?tabid=68), Apache SOAP, kSOAP

IDE's: Eclipse, Borland JBuilder, IBM Websphere, Oracle JDeveloper, BEA WebLogic Workshop, IntelliJ IDEA, Blackberry MDS, plus others...

Python:

Library: pyControl (devcentral.f5.com/Default.aspx?tabid=149), ZSI, SOAPpy, Suds

IDE's: Komodo, Eclipse PyDev, and others.

PHP:

Library: PHP SOAP (us3.php.net/soap)

IDE's: Eclipse PHP IDE, PHPEclipse, Komodo, Zen Studio, and others.

Ruby:

Library: iControl Assembly for .Net, SOAP4R

IDE's: IronRuby (.Net support), NetBeans, Idea, RadRails, and others.

v.10 – Finding the Edge (so you don’t have to)

If you haven’t heard about about the revolution underway,  you’re not paying attention. To get a running update of the cool new features in v.10, check out the fresh new v.10 spotlight page. Otherwise, read on.

Here at DevCentral, you can count on (at least) three things:

1.) Our team is comprised of full-on geeks who are constantly trying to stretch our technology and challenge each other at the same time.

2.) We do out best to call it the way it is and as we see it. You bet your career and company on us so you deserve nothing less than the straight truth.

3.) If it relates to iRules, iControl, or other advanced F5 technical topics, you’ll probably hear about it first on DevCentral.

Item #1 above puts us in a unique position where – sometimes – we break stuff. While we would love to say there are never bugs or issues with our products, that wouldn’t be true and you wouldn’t believe us anyway. So, our “policy” is that if we know about it and it can affect you, you deserve to know about it too. While we like surprises on our birthdays, we don’t like surprises when upgrading software or rolling out new features. We suspect you feel the same way.

So, with that said, here’s something you need to pay attention to as you migrate to v10. While performing internal testing on some advanced iRules on v10, we discovered a possible scenario that users should be aware of.  Making use of certain commands: (session, persist <add, lookup, delete>, after) inside one of a few specific constructs: (switch, foreach, eval, catch) can result in a race condition, causing serious repercussions to the performance and stability of your device.

The good news is that we've discovered this internally, zeroed in on the very specific nature of the issues, and our fantastic PD team is already working to correct them. Things will again function properly as of v10.0.1, slated to release in a few weeks. It is highly recommended that if you are running code making use of any of these command combinations that you either re-work your code to avoid them before upgrading to v10.0, or wait until v10.0.1 is released with the necessary fixes in place to avoid this issue.

To learn more about how to rework your existing iRules to avoid this issue, you should check out the document posted here in the iRule forum. If you have questions or feedback, please reach out and let us know how we can help.

While you’re thinking about that, you might want to click on over to “New in v.10” section of the iRule Wiki to familiarize yourself with the new functionality.

[update] Since Joe came in to my office and whined that iControl wasn’t getting enough props (in addition to iRules), here’s the link. Be sure to check it out. Word. [/update]

Change happens

I had a fascinating conversation recently with an IT pro that I know and respect. We were talking about IT management, issue triage and resolution, and he made the point that the first question any IT pro asks is, “what changed?” Makes sense to me.

For many, change = risk. I understand that. Change even the littlest detail and there’s a reasonable likelihood that the fragile web of intricate IT interdependencies will come crashing down.

Often, the risk (or fear?) of change is justification for standing still – not upgrading or choosing a newer, better approach that provides orders of magnitude more functionality for the same or lower cost. I can see the reasoning, but in my opinion, that is incredibly short-sighted.

Here’s another way of looking at it: You are ALWAYS going to be dealing with change, no matter what kind of change it is, whether it is orchestrated by you or others. Change happens, whether it is proactive or passive, offensive or defensive.

It seems to me you have two choices:

• Accept the status quo. Continue burning precious time (yours and others) and budget troubleshooting changes that happen with the same old gear. Simply rehearse the response, “that’s how we’ve always done it…”.
• Embrace progress and change to something better or new to you. Ideally, your reward is a better way of resolving (and maybe ending!) the same old problems you were dealing with before. Worst case is that you at least get new and interesting troubleshooting challenges to take on, right?!

One is driven by fear. The other is motivated by progress, growth, and improvement beyond the status quo.

In sporting terms, one is referred to as “playing not to lose”. The other? “Playing to win.”

If you’re going to deal with the impact of changes one way or another, isn’t it worth it to at least take charge and make it interesting?

Fresh Video and News About DevCentral-China Launch Event

For those not able to tune in to our live launch event at DevCentral this week, here is a great video to watch. It features F5’s Dan Matte, Johnson Chen, and Fred Wu presenting at the local China launch event for DevCentral-China in Shanghai.

You can watch it at Network Chinabyte here!

Here is another article from China’s IT168 that includes some great pics.

MSNBC.com BIG-IPs Help 20 Million Visitors Follow Obama Victory

Election Day 2008 represented many “firsts”. As more people document President Obama’s campaign team and their creative use of social media (Twitter, etc.), one aspect few have explored is the web infrastructure used to support the flurry of online activity. For MSNBC.com, Election Day 2008 represented the biggest day of traffic in it’s 12-year history with over 20 million unique viewers and 250 million page views. Wow.

When it comes to IT, it’s always fun to throw around big numbers. Well, these are indeed BIG numbers.

Here is a particularly interesting aspect that really speaks to the importance of actual site performance under heavy demand: this technology enabled MSNBC.com to increase viewer loyalty through improved website performance, resulting in 13.5 minutes spent per user on MSNBC.com compared to 10.5 minutes for CNN.com (Nielson Online).

Fascinating stuff. Big performance numbers for the IT team. Serious value for the business team.

Check out the just published case study (PDF) here on f5.com.

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