This technical brief describes recommended techniques for installing, configuring and tuning Traffic Manager. You should also refer to the Product Documentation for detailed instructions on the installation process of Traffic Manager software.
Getting started
Tuning Stingray Traffic Manager
Tuning the operating system kernel
The following instructions only apply to Traffic Manager software running on a customer-supplied Linux or Solaris kernel:
Debugging procedures for Performance Problems
Load Testing
Conclusion
The Traffic Manager software and the operating system kernels both seek to optimize the use of the resources available to them, and there is generally little additional tuning necessary except when running in heavily-loaded or performance-critical environments.
When tuning is required, the majority of tunings relate to the kernel and tcp stack and are common to all networked applications. Experience and knowledge you have of tuning webservers and other applications on Linux or Solaris can be applied directly to Traffic Manager tuning, and skills that you gain working with Traffic Manager can be transferred to other situations.
The importance of good application design
TCP and kernel performance tuning will only help to a small degree if the application running over HTTP is poorly designed. Heavy-weight web pages with large quantities of referenced content and scripts will tend to deliver a poorer user experience and will limit the capacity of the network to support large numbers of users.
Traffic Manager's Web Content Optimization capability ("Aptimizer") applies best-practice rules for content optimization dynamically, as the content is delivered by Traffic Manager. It applies browser-aware techniques to reduce bandwidth and TCP round-trips (image, CSS, JavaScript and HTML minification, image resampling, CSS merging, image spriting) and it automatically applies URL versioning and far-future expires to ensure that clients cache all content and never needlessly request an update for a resource which has not changed.
Traffic Manager's Aptimizer is a general purpose solution that complements TCP tuning to give better performance and a better service level. If you’re serious about optimizing web performance, you should apply a range of techniques from layer 2-4 (network) up to layer 7 and beyond to deliver the best possible end-user experience while maximizing the capacity of your infrastructure.
