Application acceleration focuses on improving application delivery by avoiding bottlenecks and other network slowdowns. High performance, uptime, and the ability to handle a large volume of concurrent sessions hinge on reliable data transfers between server and client. Reducing data volumes and the number of network hops also makes a noticeable difference in application performance.
Overall, application acceleration encompasses many core capabilities of load balancing and application delivery, such as global server load balancing, connection pooling, and HTTP compression.
How does application acceleration work?
Application acceleration leverages multiple features to improve application performance:
Global Server Load Balancing (GSLB) assesses server load, health, and client-server proximity to choose the best possible destination for client requests. This prevents content delivery delays and boosts delivery speed by reducing request/response travel times.
HTTP compression uses one or more algorithms to reduce data payloads traversing the network, reducing the size of each request and minimizing consumed bandwidth.
Caching stores copies of files on a server so they're easily accessible later on, and helps users access content sooner when used within a CDN.
Connection pooling maintains a group of open and reusable connections, slashing latency by negating the need to make new connections from scratch.
Content buffering reduces resource consumption during peak loads by strategically throttling client connections.
Security measures like Web Application Firewalls (WAFs), rate limiting, anti-hotlinking, and high-performance SSL/TLS block harmful traffic without introducing notable processing overhead.
Why is application acceleration useful?
Application acceleration is all about boosting performance, security, and reliability by serving client requests as efficiently as possible. The overall goal is to mitigate the limiting factors that impact how content traverses the web.
As a result, application acceleration allows teams to optimize network performance—ensuring requests and responses arrive as quickly as possible while consuming minimal bandwidth. These optimizations also benefit end users by boosting application responsiveness, which is both measurable and perceptible. Rakuten 24 noted a 53.37% increase in revenue per visitor after optimizing their site according to Google's Core Web Vitals guidelines, which encompasses metrics like largest contentful paint, first input delay, and interaction to next paint. Application acceleration can help improve these metrics for web applications by streamlining content delivery.
On top of that, application acceleration provides the following:
Greater scalability – By optimizing how data is transmitted and processed, applications can support more users and transactions without a proportional increase in response times.
Increased productivity – Improved application performance increases user productivity, especially in business and enterprise cases. Teams can finish tasks more efficiently when applications are more responsive.
Mobile device support – Mobile users often grapple with changing network conditions, and application acceleration helps mitigate these issues. This—especially when paired with HTTP/3-ready applications—ensures a smooth and stable experience.
Cost savings – By optimizing network usage and boosting server efficiency, application acceleration can introduce cost savings. Lower bandwidth consumption, lower server infrastructure requirements, and improved user productivity contribute to a more cost-effective IT environment.
Does HAProxy offer application acceleration?
Yes! HAProxy offers a host of application acceleration features aimed at delivering applications more efficiently and boosting overall performance. Security also plays an important role. Thwarting DDoS attacks and more through measures such as our OWASP Core Rule Set WAF helps HAProxy protect available network bandwidth and guard against server resource use.
Location can also impact application performance. Our HAProxy Edge application delivery network (ADN) includes CDN functionality to the table, connecting clients to the servers that are closest to them. Plus, HAProxy ALOHA offers global server load balancing (GSLB) to assign clients to the nearest datacenter. HAProxy can thus function as an advanced DNS server.
