Limelight Networks and Japanese Social Networking Site GREE

The first use case most IT professionals think of for content delivery networks is that they are used to accelerate "large objects" — massive high-definition video files, games, or software packages that need to be delivered to an end-user quickly. While that’s certainly the case, what’s often overlooked is the need to speed up the "small objects" — thumbnail graphics, html files, JavaScript code, or style sheet files — that also make up a web page.

While "small objects" are usually less than 100k in size, web sites deliver these objects with every page view. The delivery must happen quickly - if a web page, its graphics, and associated script files should take 1 second to load, an increase of 3 seconds (due to a slow server or Internet congestion) can result in a poor user experience and potentially lost customers.  Additionally, for large sites with hundreds of millions of page views a day, the total bandwidth needed to deliver the small objects can add up. Content delivery networks can help ensure the user experience and help the site owner manage their bandwidth costs.

The new customer we are announcing today, GREE (www.gree.jp ), is using LimelightDELIVER to help speed up the delivery of small objects. As the second-largest social networking service in Japan, GREE has over 5 million members. These members post profile pictures, photos, messages, and other "small object" items to the GREE site, and then share them with friends (similar to how users other parts of the world use Facebook, which is also a Limelight Networks "small object" customer). Since GREE allows access from both a web browser and a mobile phone, their objects are served millions of times a day in desktop and mobile resolutions and sizes. GREE is storing their these "small objects" within Limelight Networks origin servers, which means that in many cases, they will never travel over the public Internet. This helps ensure that objects that are rarely requested are delivered with the same response and efficiency as the most-requested ones.

As a Japanese-only site, the overwhelming majority of GREE’s users will access the site from a connection within Japan. As such, the Limelight Networks CDN will be used to mainly provide inter -country acceleration of the "small objects," leveraging our state-of-the-art data center in Tokyo. And in case you were wondering, we’ll also handle intra -country delivery, for those users who need access outside of Japan.

We’re pleased to be growing both our international and our "small object" delivery business, by working with a respected brand like GREE.

Tags: GREE, small objects

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 1st, 2008 at 6:53 am and is filed under Content Delivery Network. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.