Google Adds New CDN Service Appropriately Titled Page Speed Service

In Google’s never-ending quest to conquer the internet, they announced a new CDN product recently to compete with companies like Akamai and Limelight. The product is simply called Page Speed Service and claims to speed up website delivery from 25 - 60% on average.

Basically the service works by caching your websites on its’ servers all over the globe and optimizing your page code to speed up loading. To use the service, you need to sign up, create a cname entry for your website, and point it to Google’s servers. The next step is where Google’s service differentiates from other services like Akamai and Limelight. It actually rewrites the content of your pages and applies web performance best practices to your code. The re-written pages are then served by Google’s servers all over the world.

This is an interesting idea, and has the potential to greatly improve the performance of many sites. However, some concerns have already been raised about the service’s optimization. The main concern I see is that in theory, Google’s optimization process could optimize sites to perform better in their Chrome browser, but may not have the same effect on other competing browsers. I’m not saying they would do this, but it would be a possibility. Another concern I see is that this type of thing can make developers lazy. When I see quotes like, “Now you don’t have to worry about concatenating CSS, compressing images, caching, gzipping resources or other web performance best practices.” (Ramani, July 2011), it makes me nervous that people will interpret it to mean they can now write non-optimized code and let Google take care of it for them.

I tested a couple of websites we’ve built to see just how much improvement we would receive from the service and the results were very interesting. One site is already cached by Akamai’s service, and according to the test, we would receive around a 30% increase in performance. Another site that isn’t using a CDN showed only a 2% increase in performance. My guess is that this is related to Google’s optimization service and the non-CDN site has fairly optimized code already, and the site on Akamai must be lacking in that department.

To run tests of your own, head over to the comparison page and enter in your website’s url. To find out more about Google’s service, go to the Page Speed Service Home Page.

Source googlecode.blogspot.com