Seattle.internet.com recently headed to the county of Whatcom to see up close
what Post Point Software was up to in the area of dotcom. The
Bellingham-based company, co-founded by former Microsoft Developer Wayne
Walter Berry and former Microsoft Program Manager Dina Berry, not only
recently secured its first round of venture funding from iStart ventures in
Seattle, but also just released its flagship caching product XCache.
XCache is a software solution that caches dynamic pages to significantly
increase the speed of content delivery to the user, compared to content that
is delivered as an Active Server Page (ASP). XCache enables dynamic web
content (ASP, Cold Fusion and CGI scripts) pulled from a database to be
generated “on the fly” at the time of the Web request.
Post Point Software recently ran a two-hour stress test against its own
dynamic website, configured for 100 users. The results where quite
interesting: The site using XCache was able to handle an average of 8.75
requests per second and 62,983 total hits, as opposed to the site without
XCache that was able to handle only an average of 1.26 requests per second
and 9072 total hits.
Berry and his team are not the only people that have been checking out
XCache’s performance. In fact, several companies have been using XCache in
a beta evaluation phase. According to Senior Software Engineer of Mainsail
Web Development Paul Brinkley-Rogers, the Active Caching feature of XCache
ensures that real-time content can be delivered with caching speed. “This
greatly reduces server load.” According to Vice President of Technology for
DevX.com Chris Kinsman, XCache is very easy to install, quick to get running
and doesn’t require a bunch of code changes on the site. “From our
preliminary evaluation, XCache will meet the needs of reducing the load on
our database servers and increase performance on our website.”
According to Berry, delivering content much faster significantly improves
site performance to keep visitors interested in and staying longer at major
e-commerce sites. “And with the high cost of attracting new visitors, it is
important to give an impression that will bring them back, especially on
websites with a limited target audience.”
