Slower website under Akamai

This week I was investigating an interesting problem related to slowness of website for a particular client accessing from North Atlantic island, Bermuda. This client experienced slowness only while accessing our website in spite of having a 10Mbps pipe. To give a background, our website hosted in US runs on Akamai relay and has an average response time under 4 secs for most of the pages from across the globe. But that was not enough to convince our client who compared our site with competitors. Clearly the problem was on the client end, but how to convince?

To start, trace route was requested from client location to both websites; client trying to reach our website hopped across ISP's in europe, west coast, mid-west before reaching into ours in north east. This should not have happened since we were on Akamai. Next, looking at clients ISP provider our suspicion grew further; they were using a DNS provider in US, which computed a path closer to its location, i.e US. In a general web relay this is normal, but with Akamai this does not play well.

Content distribution networks like Akamai, InterNap, etc., deploy servers globally that contains copies of data placed at various nodes and communicate with their other nodes using high speed network and proprietary protocols. This speeds up page publishing for clients connecting from global locations, who do not have to connect to the website hosted in your data center, but rather connect to one of these nodes nearer to their location. In our case, client should have hit an Akamai server within their region, which in turn should stream contents at blazing speed. This did not happen, for one of the two reasons:

1. Name server used by client's ISP network either did not contain proper akamai location in their region OR

2. The DNS was living on a different region, which picked an Akamai edge server near its location instead of clients location.

Analyzing, the name server IP it was evident the ISP provider was using services from US, which when used to query our domain name resolved to an Akamai node in US; and the client was now traveling on low speed public internet across continent to get into Akamai server node, loosing all benefits of high speed network.

The fix here is not with Akamai, but with the client and their external DNS provider. Such similar issues may also arise with corporate networks spanning geographies, where DNS translation may be delegated within internal network to a central node which may or may not be near to the request origination location.