Ion

The web front end encompasses everything a browser does to stitch together a page, including fetching embedded objects, parsing style sheets, and executing JavaScript. The majority of an end user’s wait time for any given page is spent in the front end, so optimizations to front-end performance specifically have significant benefits for the performance of a website overall.

The amount of performance benefit that Ion can deliver will vary from site to site, page to page, and even based on which browser or device is being used to make the request. This is why Akamai recommends a layered approach to performance, consisting of acceleration, prefetching, request reduction, payload reduction, and rendering optimizations. It is also why having a single vendor providing these optimizations is beneficial since the integration between these technologies is already included and supported.

Yes, Ion can help execution of third-party services and content by modifying the sequence and order of execution to help avoid a negative impact of poorly performing third parties. This is typically accomplished through the use of asynchronous JavaScript calls and by deferring JavaScript execution until after the onload event to help mitigate negative effects of third parties on the user experience.

Ion has a feature called Adaptive Image Compression that offers the ability to vary the level of compression for JPEG images delivered to mobile devices based on real-time network conditions, allowing mobile pages to load much faster even when network conditions are poor. Adaptive Image Compression provides configuration options to decide how and when to deliver a version of an image with greater compression to reduce the amount of associated data, and help improve mobile performance. Conversely, Adaptive Image Compression will serve up a less compressed image when the network conditions are sufficient. The result is an optimized and improved mobile experience that is intelligently responsive to real-time network conditions.

Due to the nature of mobile networks, Ion can have a significant performance benefit for mobile delivery. The so-called “last mile” associated with mobile networks is often prone to network latency and packet loss, forcing data retransmission and decreased responsiveness — all of which adversely affects user experience. The fewer protocol back-and-forth data negotiations, and the smaller the data payloads, the greater the performance benefit to mobile users. Since Ion is specifically built to provide these benefits, it is extremely well suited for these use cases. 

You can choose to integrate Ion with Akamai mPulse real user monitoring (RUM) to help measure specific Ion performance optimizations. mPulse collects performance information from end-user browsers as they load your website. Real user monitoring, also known as end-user experience monitoring or actual experience monitoring, is a passive web monitoring technology that records user interaction with a website. Monitoring actual user interaction with a website is important to website operators to determine if users are being served quickly and without errors — and if they are not, which part of a business process is impacting experience.

Ion has a feature called Device Characterization that allows organizations to make real-time decisions about the specific web experience delivered to a site visitor, based on the capabilities of that end user’s device. Using information derived from the browser’s user agent, Akamai Connected Cloud is able to decipher many characteristics of the requesting device, such as screen size, GPS for location-based services, JavaScript support, and many more. These characteristics are then made available as part of the user request, allowing companies to make intelligent decisions regarding how to respond to a particular request. Importantly, specific caching rules based on various device characteristics can be used to make more of your infrastructure available at the edge, where it is most useful to mobile users. The page that is delivered to each category of device can be unique, providing both improved user experience and reduced page weight, which can help reduce the time needed to deliver the page.