aiCache Web Application Acceleration

We use aiCache at Giant Digital in front of our load balanced AWS hosted servers on Scalr. Although occasionally we do experience high loads that spawn multiple DBs or web servers for the most part aiCache deals with 99% of the traffic that's thrown at it and this is for 20 million+ pages a month servers.

We have a fairly large application running on 30 or so quad extra large boxes in EC2 and still having some difficulty managing peak spikes. When our dedicated load balancer gave way to inbound traffic, we approached aiCache to assist us. They took on the task of understanding our requirements and work with us to configure and deploy aiCache literally within minutes of initial request, in fact our DNS cutover from the dedicated load balancer took longer and since then, we have been happily in production without issue. Although we initially only looked at aiCache as a sort of a stop gap load balancing software while put in a larger hardware load balancer in place, we have discovered that it does wonders with caching and has allowed us to remove half the nodes from our app server setup already. Oh and that dedicated hardware load balancer? We don't have it anymore and no plans to acquire one. Thanks aiCache.

aiCache has increased page load time dramatically. Instillation was fairly smooth with minimal downtime. Configuration is straight-forward and there seem to be a plethora of advanced features we have yet to explore. The only suggestion I have is the implementation of a GUI for configuration changes. Otherwise, so far, so good. We are pleased with the service and initial support has been exceptional and responsive. While we are fairly new to aiCache and have relatively limited experience, I have no reservations about highly recommending this product. Kevin Gleeson

We were looking for something to help keep as much load as possible off our Windows origin servers. Our website is subject to extreme spikes in traffic, and there are make requests that can be cached. The caching layer needs to allow through requests with cookied sessions, while servering up cached versions of the same URLs to the general public. Varnishd and Nginx were both considered, and did basic caching well. But both were difficult to set-up, and responding to cookied sessions significantly reduced their maximum throughput. We've now used aiCache during several large events, and the CPU is hardly pressed at all. The rules we put in place to respond to errors and downtime on origin servers has allowed us to maintain excellent uptime. The support from aiCache had been excellent. They were able to create a new feature for us in under 24 hours, and we have never had a problem getting them on the line when we have questions. aiCache is a great product for companies that require a caching layer, but are not ready for a full CDN. You don't get the added benefit of geo-caching, but 1 aiCache server can handle a lot of traffic. At the point where you need two load-balanced aiCache servers, the CDN might become a more attractive option. But with aiCache supporting 25,000 req/s, the average website is going to take a long time before they hit that ceiling.