Surge 2012 ~ Bryce Howard ~ They Own the Pipes. You Own the Water.
What you believe is making your web service slow is likely wrong. And what you're planning to do about it is likely less effective and more expensive than need be. A short, focused investigation revealed that naive usage of TCP and SSL contributes almost 80% of the total perceived latency of our AvaTax SaaS offering. Additional research demonstrated this same naïveté to be true of many other web services. A profound realization set in, many simply take Internet latency as a given. Resetting our perspective, that the Internet serves us—not to the other way around, has led us to produce some counter-intuitive performance optimizations. I will discuss the fundamentals of TCP/SSL, and how we are intending to cheat the "standard" to slash service latency and gain competitive advantage. I will present working code samples of the applied techniques, and demonstrate the tools used to measure and analyze Internet latency at the required detail level.