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Origins

In the context of web traffic management, an origin refers to the server that is hosting the content for a website or application. Origin selection in Peakhour involves choosing which origin server to use for a given request, based on various factors such as the URL, the client's location, and the performance of the origin server.

Peakhour provides several options for origin selection, allowing you to tailor the routing of requests to your specific needs. Some of the key features of origin selection in Peakhour are:

DNS Based Origin Selection#

You can use the DNS name of your origin server as the origin in Peakhour. Simply enter the DNS name under the "origin server" section in the site-settings, and Peakhour will resolve it to one or more IP addresses. The Time To Live (TTL) of the origin server will also be honored, meaning that Peakhour will cache the IP addresses for the length of the TTL.

In the event of a DNS failure, Peakhour will continue to use the last known IP addresses of the origin server.

Origin Load Balancing#

Peakhour provides two methods for load balancing requests to multiple origin servers: round-robin and client address. In the round-robin method, requests are distributed evenly among the available origins. In the client address method, requests are routed to the origin server based on a hash of the client IP address, achieving basic session persistence.

Origin error handling#

When multiple origins are configured for your domain, Peakhour can detect and handle miss behaving origins. We support marking an origin as down based on the following error counts:

  • Connection refused
  • Connection reset
  • Server 5xx error
  • Response timeouts

When a connection error is received from an origin, Peakhour will attempt to process requests at another origin. The affected origin will be marked as down for a configurable period of time, after which it will be retried. This ensures that requests are being handled even when one or more origins are experiencing issues.

URL Based Origin Server Selection#

Peakhour also allows you to route origin servers based on the URL of the request. To set this up, you first need to define an origin pool with a user-defined name. Then, use that pool name in the URL configuration to determine which origin server should be used for which request.

Origin selection in Peakhour provides a range of options for routing requests to the most appropriate origin server, based on various factors such as the URL, the client's location, and the performance of the origin server. Whether you have one origin server or many, Peakhour can help you manage your web traffic and ensure high availability for your users.

Origin shielding#

Origin shilding reduces the number of requests to the origin server, thereby improving the cache hit rate. This is accomplished by having multiple Points of Presence (POPs) of the CDN network point to a single, designated POP, known as the shield POP. This shield POP acts as a proxy for all the other POPs and is responsible for fetching the content from the origin server, caching it, and serving it to the end-users.

By reducing the number of requests to the origin server, origin shielding reduces the load on the origin server, improves the performance and availability of the website or application, and reduces the latency for end-users. Additionally, having a single shield POP allows for better control over the content that is being served, as the shield POP can apply various optimization techniques, such as compression and image optimization, before serving the content to the end-users.

Origin shielding is a valuable technique in CDN that helps to improve the cache hit rate, reduce the load on the origin server, and improve the overall performance and availability of the website or application.