Over the last few months, we've been running some performance tests with BroadBand Testing. We originally comissioned them to independently measure the performance of Zeus software on a particular hardware platform, but we asked them to take a look at how Zeus Traffic Manager could accelerate some common web-based applications as well.
The results surprised us all, and clearly illustrated how the various capabilities of ZXTM worked together to give some very dramatic performance boosts.
"This is the first time we've tested Zeus Traffic Manager directly in an application acceleration scenario. This is an area where there is keen competition, yet where many of the incumbent vendors are making great claims about performance improvements in the region of 2-3 times, with Zeus Traffic Manager we effortlessly achieved between 10-40 times improvement in performance over the application working alone. This says something about the Zeus solution."
Steve Broadhead, BroadBand Testing
Accelerating Apache
When BroadBand testing examined the effect of using Zeus Traffic Manager to manage LAN and WAN traffic to an Apache server (Read more):
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Apache's Keepalive Implementation gives very inconsistent levels of service when under load. Zeus Traffic Manager can manage Keepalives on Apache's behalf to give even and consistent levels of service.
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Apache's performance when not using Keepalives is poor, with large error rates and low transaction rates. Using Zeus Traffic Manager with or without Keepalives totally eliminates errors, and results in an increase of up to 18-times the sustained transaction rate.
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Apache's SSL performance is sub optimal, with slow transaction times, limited capacity and connection errors under load. Using Zeus Traffic Manager to decrypt SSL traffic provides up to 20-times the transaction rate and 20-times faster transactions, with no connection errors.
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Apache performs very poorly on real-world high-latency networks. Zeus Traffic Manager almost totally eliminates the high-latency effects, giving up to 40-times better utilisation, and 8-times faster transaction times.
Accelerating BEA WebLogic
Similar tests were conducted against a BEA WebLogic server (Read more):
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Zeus Traffic Manager could up to double the transaction rate that could be achieved from WebLogic, with no additional software or server tuning.
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Transactions were over twice as fast when using Zeus Traffic Manager, under sustained load from multiple clients.
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Using Zeus Traffic Manager to decrypt SSL traffic provided over 15-times the SSL performance - enough to saturate the WebLogic server with regular requests.
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Errors were totally eliminated for all but the most demanding tests.
How does Zeus Traffic Manager do this?
There's a combination of features in Zeus Traffic Manager that contribute to this acceleration effect:
- Offloading compute-intensive tasks so that each application can concentrate on its core tasks;
- Accelerating and buffering TCP transactions to achieve local-network speeds, even over a global WAN;
- Minimizing connection processing on the application by optimized HTTP KeepAlive multiplexing;
- Caching frequently-requested content on behalf of the application.
The full details, including test methodologies and results, are written up in a number of white papers:
