section.io Website Performance and Security Blog

One of the trickiest parts of understanding how fast your website loads for users is knowing which metric to use. The natural inclination would be to measure how long it takes the entire page to load. Others would argue that you should instead look at how long before something appears visually on the page. Or should we instead focus on Time to First Byte because Google cares about it enough to factor it into your Search Engine Results Page?

Magento is a popular ecommerce platform, but it can be slow to load, especially for stores with large databases of products. In their release of Magento 2, Magento has looked to improve performance by creating a system that can be easily integrated with Varnish Cache, a powerful HTTP accelerator and reverse proxy. As more ecommerce shops move to Magento, we’re hearing more questions about how exactly Magento 2 and Varnish Cache work together and how to troubleshoot common Magento-Varnish Cache issues.

Join section.io CEO Stewart McGrath on May 23rd at 1pm ET as he leads a webinar on the importance of website performance for ecommerce and media sites. This interactive session will give viewers solid takeaways on why website speed and scalability are important and how to start improving the performance of their own websites through both

Web application firewalls have been around for over 20 years, but recent advancements in how they block bad traffic and are managed by development teams encouraged us to take a look at the history of firewalls, WAFs, and where website security is heading.

At section.io we are occasionally asked if users should implement cache warming to increase the likelihood that their visitors will be served content from the cache and as a result speed up page load times. In this blog we want to go over the concept of a warm cache vs a cold cache and the benefits and downsides of warming your cache for visitors.

In 2005 Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, began working on a version control system that would soon revolutionize the way developers collaborated. Realizing that proprietary source control management systems were not sufficient to achieve what Torvalds needed, he decided to design his own that would meet his needs.

One of the most common questions we are asked at section.io is “how long does it take to (select your favourite term) “clear”, “purge”, “evict”, or “ban” an item the cache?” Our answer has been “near real time” as we built section.io to instantly purge cache globally.

section.io is pleased to announce we have added several additional Varnish Cache versions to our Edge PaaS. When setting up with section.io, users can choose the reverse proxies they run and the versions of those proxies. section.io is committed to offering unmodified open-source software and not “locking in” users to a specific reverse proxy version. That’s why we now offer 7 Varnish Cache versions and additional options with VCL for static caching and Magento-specific capabilities.

section.io believes that developers should have all the tools they need to evaluate and improve their content delivery within one solution, which is why we have recently added robust synthetic monitoring to our core feature set. When combined with section.io’s Real User Monitoring, proxy-specific metrics, and log management, this release ensures that all section.io accounts have the comprehensive monitoring tools they need to continually troubleshoot and improve their website performance.

Containerization breaks applications into components which can easily be deployed and scaled, bringing many benefits to software development. The flexibility containerization brings fits well with modern application development practices and DevOps principles, and has become popular with the growth of platforms including Docker and Kubernetes.