Performance on Eknix — Web security & performance for the enterprise

Performance on Eknix — Web security & performance for the enterprisehttps://www.eknix.com/tags/performance/Recent content in Performance on Eknix — Web security & performance for the enterpriseHugoen-us© {year} EKNIX LTD. All rights reserved.Tue, 10 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000The CDN math that actually matters for e-commercehttps://www.eknix.com/blog/cdn-math-ecommerce/Tue, 10 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://www.eknix.com/blog/cdn-math-ecommerce/<p>When we audit a <a href="https://www.eknix.com/solutions/performance-cdn/">CDN deployment</a> for an e-commerce client, we don’t start with the dashboard the vendor provides. We start with four numbers. If these four numbers aren’t being tracked, optimized, and reported every month, the deployment is almost certainly underperforming.</p> <h2 id="1-cache-hit-ratio-by-content-type">1. Cache hit ratio (by content type)</h2> <p>The aggregate cache hit ratio is mostly useless — it’s dominated by static assets that would cache anywhere. What matters is the cache hit ratio broken down by content type:</p>How CDN node mapping actually workshttps://www.eknix.com/blog/cdn-node-mapping/Mon, 10 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000https://www.eknix.com/blog/cdn-node-mapping/<p>There’s an interview question that used to be a rite of passage in backend engineering: “Walk me through everything that happens when a user types a URL and hits enter.” Most answers got stuck on DNS and TLS. The part most people glossed over — how the request actually lands on the <em>right</em> CDN node out of thousands distributed globally — is where the interesting engineering lives.</p> <p>Get the mapping wrong and your users in Singapore are hitting a PoP in Frankfurt. The latency shows up in your P75 TTFB, in your bounce rate, and eventually in your revenue numbers.</p>Is Google reCAPTCHA a DDoS Defence? The Cost Math Says Nohttps://www.eknix.com/blog/recaptcha-ddos-cost/Wed, 14 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000https://www.eknix.com/blog/recaptcha-ddos-cost/<p>There’s a category of question that gets asked quietly in Slack channels and in private post-incident reviews: “could we just use reCAPTCHA to handle this?” It’s not an unreasonable instinct. Google reCAPTCHA is already deployed on most sites, it can challenge suspicious traffic, and it costs nothing for the first ten thousand requests. As a lightweight speed bump, it has its place.</p> <p>But “speed bump against DDoS traffic” and “speed bump against spam submissions” are very different things — and running reCAPTCHA into a volumetric attack has a financial profile that most teams haven’t priced out before they need to.</p>Do You Know How Your Customers Experience Your Site? Or Just Where They Go?https://www.eknix.com/blog/akamai-mpulse-real-user-monitoring/Thu, 10 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000https://www.eknix.com/blog/akamai-mpulse-real-user-monitoring/<p>Most engineering teams I talk to have Google Analytics. A lot of them assume that means they understand how their site is performing. It doesn’t.</p> <p>Google Analytics is an excellent tool for answering one set of questions: where do users come from, where do they go, what do they convert on, where do they drop off? It’s a behavioural map. It tells you the path. What it doesn’t tell you is what the path <em>felt like</em> — how long it took, how it degraded under load, which users are bouncing not because the content is wrong but because the page took five seconds to load on a 4G connection in Germany.</p>Is Your Website Ready for the Holiday Rush?https://www.eknix.com/blog/holiday-peak-readiness/Tue, 03 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000https://www.eknix.com/blog/holiday-peak-readiness/<p>11.11 just happened. Black Friday is right behind it. Then Christmas, then New Year’s. If your platform survived Singles Day with headroom to spare, you might be tempted to relax. Don’t. Each of these events amplifies the same underlying gaps — and the ones that don’t show up under moderate traffic tend to surface spectacularly under peak load.</p> <p>The preparation conversation usually focuses on infrastructure scaling: more instances, higher database connection limits, load balancer tuning. That’s necessary but not sufficient. Two factors that consistently determine whether a platform has a good or bad holiday season sit outside the application layer entirely: security posture and edge performance.</p>