Those of you who are Gartner clients know that in the last year, my colleague Joe Skorupa and I have become excited about the emergence of software-based application acceleration via page optimization approaches, as exemplified by vendors like Aptimize and Strangeloop Networks. (Clients: See Cool Vendors in Enterprise Networking, 2010.) This approach to acceleration enhances the performance of Web-based content and applications, by automatically optimizing the page output of webservers according to the best practices described in books like High Performance Web Sites by Steve Souders. Techniques of this sort include automatically combining JavaScript files (which reduces overall download time), optimizing the order of the scripts, and rewriting HTML so that the browser can display the page more quickly.

Page optimization techniques can often provide significant acceleration boosts (2x or more) even when other acceleration techniques are in use, such as a hardware ADC with acceleration module (offered as add-ons by F5 and Citrix NetScaler, for instance), or a CDN (including CDN-based dynamic acceleration). Since early this year, we’ve been warning our CDN clients that this is a critical technology development to watch and to consider adopting in their networks. It’s a highly sensible thing to deploy on a CDN, for customers doing whole site delivery; the CDN offloads the computational expense of doing the optimization (which can be significant), and then caches the result (and potentially distributing the optimized pages to other nodes on the CDN). That gets you excellent, seamless acceleration for essentially no effort on the part of the customer.

Google’s Page Speed project provides free and open-source tools designed to help site owners implement these best practices. Google has recently released an open-source module, called mod_pagespeed, for the popular Apache webserver. This essentially creates an open-source competitor to commercial vendors like Aptimize and Strangeloop. Add the module into your Apache installation, and it will automatically try to optimize your pages for you.

Now, here’s where it gets interesting for CDN watchers: Cotendo has partnered wih Google. Cotendo is deploying the Google code (modified, obviously, to run on Cotendo’s proxy caches, which are not Apache-based), in order to be able to offer the page optimization service to its customers.

I know some of you will automatically be asking now, “What does this mean for Akamai?” The answer to that is, “Losing speed trials when it’s Akamai DSA vs. Cotendo DSA + Page Speed Automatic, until they can launch a competing service.” Akamai’s acceleration service hasn’t changed much since the Netli acquisition in 2007, and the evolution in technology here has to be addressed. Page optimization plus TCP optimization is generally much faster than TCP optimization alone. That doesn’t just have pricing implications; it has implications for the competitive dynamics of the space, too.

I fully expect that page optimization will become part of the standard dynamic acceleration service offerings of multiple CDNs next year. This is the new wave of innovation. Despite the well-documented nature of these best practices, organizations still frequently ignore them when coding — and even commercial packages like Sharepoint ignore them (Sharepoint gets a major performance boost when page optimization techniques are applied, and there are solutions like Certeon that are specific to it). So there’s a very broad swathe of customers that can benefit easily from these techniques, especially since they provide nice speed boosts even in environments where the network latency is pretty decent, like delivery within the United States.