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Instart Logic Introduces Machine Learning Technology To Speed Up Websites

This article is more than 9 years old.

Website speed has a massive bearing on peoples viewing habits. If you are an organization that monetizes either directly or indirectly from your website, you have a critical need to ensure that your website content loads as fast as possible. When you're delivering that content to viewers all around the world using different devices and with different connection speeds, you've got a complex problem to resolve.

Of course this is well known, and content deliver network (CDN) vendors have been helping organizations with this problem for years - these CDNs put the content as close to the viewer as possible, thus reducing the time it takes to serve content to them.

Instart Logic however believes that this traditional approach towards content delivery is broken, and it wants to introduce new approaches to speeding up websites that will disrupt the traditional CDN vendors. The company's platform virtualizes applications on the browser while at the same time utilizing machine learning to optimize the way application components are delivered.

Instart Logic only launched their product into the market in 2013 but has already found success with high-profile websites such as One Kings Lane, Nasty Gal, Wine.com, and Dollar Shave Club. Instart Logic believes that their approach can typically deliver a 2x-3x performance improvement over legacy CDN approaches. It's a bold claim, but one that has gotten attention of some knowledgeable investors, Andreessen Horowitz, Greylock Partners and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers are all backing the company.

Instart Logic's new offering is called SmartSequence. What it does is to leverage machine learning specifically to optimize how both HTML and JavaScript are loaded in browsers. And they're backing up their promises by way of a guarantee promising the service is at least 20% faster than traditional approaches.

As JavaScript is being used more and more for what it can offer in terms of client-side functionality, it has also attracted a number of add-on libraries and frameworks - jQuery Angular, Backbone and Ember among them. The result is that the amount of JavaScript being used by the top 100 websites has tripled over the last three years. At the same time the amount of HTML used has doubled. All of this code adds functionality, but reduces the performance of websites.

Which is where SmartSequence comes in. The product allows browsers to load only the code that’s needed which greatly reduces download size and speeds up performance. SmartSequence watches user behavior to instrument code and learn which code is most frequently used. For JavaScript streaming, it downloads only what a web page or web application needs, while ignoring unused or dead code. For HTML streaming, it determines which portions of dynamic HTML are common across all users and sends them in advance. SmartSequence can also learn which sections of theare dynamic versus static and patch in dynamic data as needed.

PetFlow.com, a pet food subscription service, has deployed SmartSequence and appears pleased with the results. Says Garroch Neil from the company:

Designing an interactive and dynamic website greatly increased our dependency on JavaScript and HTML, which in turn substantially impacted page load times. To date with Instart Logic’s service, we have seen reductions in page load times of up to 60% in some cases. And now with SmartSequence technology, we are experiencing incremental load time improvements of about 15%.

SmartSequence looks like an interesting addition to Instart Logic's offering - their claims of being an "Akamai-killer" are likely a little presumptuous but, notwithstanding that, it seems that they're continuing to innovate which will no-doubt ensure they have a positive future ahead of them.

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