Overview of Web Server Acceleration

The appliance's origin Web server accelerator relies on DNS to cause the accelerator to receive requests originally targeted at the origin Web server. The Web server accelerator handles the requests, accessing the origin Web server only when needed objects are not cached.

How Origin Web Server Acceleration Works

The mechanism for routing browser requests to the Web server accelerator instead of the Web server can be summarized as follows:

• Without acceleration, DNS resolves the origin Web server's DNS name to the origin server's IP address.
• With acceleration, DNS resolves the server's name to the IP address of an appliance Web server accelerator (reverse proxy) service.

Figure 18

Benefits of Origin Web Server Acceleration

• A Web server accelerator reduces response time to browser requests and frees up origin Web server bandwidth, allowing it to handle requests for less frequently requested, uncached data much more quickly.
• The appliance can accelerate origin Web servers at remote locations that don't offer broadband connections. The Web server accelerator can be located close to the Internet backbone, delivering high-speed access to browsers for all cached objects. The connection to the origin Web server is then used for transporting only those objects not already in cache.

For tips and guidelines on setting up origin Web server accelerators, see Web Server Accelerator Setup.

The procedure for configuring DNS to work with Web server accelerators is explained in Working with DNS.