speeding up WEB Applications

I have seen instances where adding persistence helps speed up a site because only one application instance is being hit per user. Although, in your case, you had source addr persistence already enabled. The HTTP profile's job is to enforce proper HTTP data as it flows through the BIG-IP. I have seen instances where applications were broken when not going through BIG-IP, but then fixed when going through BIG-IP becuase of something like the browser not support HTTP 1.1 and the server expecting it. The BIG-IP does HTTP 1.1 transformations where it can change 1.0 requests to 1.1 requests on the backend. So, the HTTP profile is doing a lot of things to streamline HTTP connections to the backend.

 

Did you change the TCP profile in the Virtual Server when you made this change as well? Are you using any other acceleration features like caching, compression or WebAccelerator? They might help accelerate more in the future.

i am not using WEB Accelerator. I plan on trying it out soon in our QA environment. I also made no changes to the TCP profile. This is a mystery to me ... why would they notice an increase in speed?

 

 

thanks for the reply

I don't fully understand why that might happen if you had source IP persistence on, that cookie would make it faster. If the user's source IP was changing in the middle of their session (AOL, megaproxy, corp LB proxy) and the BIG-IP was load balancing instead of persisting, then cookie persistence would make sure the user goes back to the same server and the server doesn't have to look the user up again. When you activated the HTTP profile, did you also change the virtual to type Standard from Performance Layer4 or were you already on standard?

the virtual type was standard and i did not change it.

 

I was thinking that the HTTP profile may have made more of a change than the persistence ... very interesting.