The popular Web site serves as a hub for consumers and merchants, offering comparison-shopping as well as research on consumer buying behavior. At BizRate.com, visitors can search the comparison-shopping engine for good deals on merchandise ranging from men's jeans to cocktail shakers, then buy an item from a particular merchant. BizRate also conducts customer satisfaction surveys at the point of sale for about 2,500 Internet merchants, including Barnes & Noble and Proflowers.com. BizRate's research group compiles reports from the surveys and sells them to the merchants. BizRate also sells category-based reports to businesses such as media and credit card companies.
BizRate has seven to eight million unique visitors each month, according to Jody Mulkey, data systems vice president. In fact, Jupiter Media Metrix reported in April that BizRate was the sixth fastest growing Web site, based on a 36.4 percent increase in the number of unique visitors between February and March 2002.
Ordinarily, more bandwidth would be necessary to handle the continuous surge in traffic to the Web servers. But BizRate decided to try something less costly before going that route, Mulkey says. The six-year-old Internet company purchased two of Redline Networks' T/X 2400 Real-Time Acceleration (RTA) appliances to manage its high-volume traffic.
The appliances--loaded with two 1.13GHz processors and 2GB of memory and an operating system designed to react quickly to client and server requests--serve as connection managers for the BizRate network, providing up to 50,000 simultaneous, permanently open 100Mbps TCP connections to its Web servers. Without them in the network, BizRate's servers were bogged down making and dropping TCP connections to users' PCs.
To further improve performance, the appliances use two proprietary optimization engines to compress the Web pages the servers then send out to a client. One engine removes data that has no effect on a Web page's appearance. The other engine uses compression algorithms that HTTP/1.1-compliant browsers understand.
Before installing the two T/X boxes, BizRate's Web servers were slowing down because of a surge in page requests from dial-up users. (Broadband users did not experience the same delays loading the BizRate pages.) The traffic increase wasn't tremendous, but the dial-up connections from the clients were keeping the Web servers' TCP connections open for too long.
At the time BizRate installed the T/X 2400s, the company was buying bandwidth at peak rates. "Now you can buy bandwidth from most providers per megabit," he says. But when the company bought the Web acceleration appliances, bandwidth was only available in tiers of 0 to 10 Mbps, 10 to 20 Mbps, and so on. With each tier came a US$10,000 to US$15,000 incremental cost, Mulkey explains.
