FEO Technical Brief

Instart Logic Advantages

Unique software-defined cloud client
architectural approach that enables end-end
control of the application delivery path

No manual optimizations, no time spent on

maintenance, no changes to code, no
Go-to-Market delays

Machine learning based approach for

automated execution of the application
delivery content

State of the art global network distribution

with comprehensive web performance and
security offerings

Front End Optimization is extremely manual, unreliable, and will cause site breakage

FEO is essentially applying web performance best practices to website content, specifically code, in order to accelerate
performance. FEO engines typically analyze web pages, create multiple optimization versions targeted towards different
device capabilities, and then disperse these to edge servers to increase the perception of a better user experience. Some
common examples include reducing the size of code by removing whitespace, caching headers, using domain sharding to
increase parallel downloads, joining multiple JavaScript files together to reduce the number of unique downloads, and
reducing the quality of images. By and large, the downfall of FEO approaches is that they try to predict what the browser
does at run-time. The unfortunate reality is these FEO approaches are extremely manual, require changes to the logic of
code, have a heavy maintenance cost and in several cases, will cause site breakage.

Instart Logics machine learning based approach is automated, highly reliable, and
requires no code changes
In stark contrast to these brittle and fragile FEO approaches, Instart Logic takes a radically different approach to
performance optimizations. Our approach leverages a machine-learning algorithm in conjunction with a cloud client
architecture to fully automate and adapt performance optimizations with no changes to the underlying code. Different
from legacy content delivery providers, Instart Logic has a cloud backend and a client-side component, the Nanovisor,
which is an abstraction layer that virtualizes the web application. The platform is completely software driven and enables
absolute visibility into the user behavior of the web application. With the automated and adaptive nature of Instart Logics
service, the fundamental flaws of FEO such as site breakage and high maintenance are never incurred. Instart Logics
software defined application delivery approach can accurately and intelligently make optimization changes at run-time
in the browser. By applying network and application-based optimizations, Instart Logic is able to guarantee high
performance, high reliability resulting in substantial time savings and maintenance costs.

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Copyright 2015 Instart Logic, Inc. All rights reserved.

FEO Technical Brief

FEO versus Machine Learning Optimizations

High Performance,
Low Reliability

High Performance,
High Reliability

Lazy load Images

HTML Streaming

InstantLoad

Image Adaptations

Prefetch Images

JavaScript Interception
Defer first and third party scripts

JavaScript Streaming

InstantOn

Instart Logic can accelerate and optimize applications

with high performance and high reliability

Low Performance,
Low Reliability

Low Performance,
High Reliability

Concat of resources
Minification

Gzip

Inline small scripts (CSS, JSS)

Low Reliability

Domain Sharding

Basic PNG Transcoding

High Reliability
Relative Reliability

Orange dot = Machine Learning Optimizations

Green dot = FEO Optimizations

The chart above aims to seek clarity as to how the various FEO approaches and machine learning based optimizations
are ranked. There is a long list of FEO techniques that exist in the market, but weve highlighted the ten most popular
used approaches and bucketed them by performance and reliability. Likewise, weve charted machine learning based
performance optimizations using the same dimensions reliability versus performance. The y axis is the measurement
of performance impact whereas the x axis quantifies the reliability of implementation.

High Performance,
Low Reliability
These FEO techniques can move the performance needle quite substantially, however, the implementation of these
approaches comes with a cost. Typically, these techniques when applied, are very manual, completely alter the
execution logic of the code, and require a high amount of maintenance. Due to their unreliability, these FEO
techniques eventually lead to site breakage.

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Copyright 2015 Instart Logic, Inc. All rights reserved.

FEO Technical Brief

Lazy Loading of Images creates a negative user experience

A well known FEO technique is lazy loading of images where images are in fact delayed to speed up page load times.
On the onset, lazy loading of images sounds impressive due to the high performance impact it can have on page load
times. However, lazy loading of images actually requires extensive rewrite to a customers HTML code and will only
apply to simple IMG tag references in HTML. Further while it might improve performance metrics, it does this at the
detriment of the user experience. The lazy loading of images means scrolling or swiping down on a page, which in
turn produces a blank screen and then images load in later. With the actual implementation of lazy loading of images,
site breakage is very high and therefore, it ranks low on the relative reliability spectrum.

Prefetching Images is very unpredictable

With modern web pages being driven by dynamic content in the form of rich imagery, most of the website weight is
likely contributed to images. Waiting for all the images on a single web page to appear can result in long wait times
and poor user experiences. Prefetching images tries to resolve this problem by assuming which links the user is most
likely to click on and prefetching the content of those images and storing them in the browsers cache. The issue
with this technique is that although it can dramatically improve performance, the reliability of prefetching images is
incredibly unpredictable since any website changes without the browser cache being cleared results in the wrong
images being served up.

Deferral of Scripts is extremely fragile

Large amounts of first and third party code can potentially cause a drag on performance. Therefore, a commonly
implemented FEO approach is the deferral of first and third party scripts whereby manual static rules are created to
delay specific JavaScript files and improve the perception of performance. Unfortunately, the deferral of first and
third party scripts is extremely fragile and is prone to break sites as the code and user behavior continually change
over time. Since there is virtually no contextual understanding of how the JavaScript code is used by end users, the
reliability of successfully implementing the deferral of scripts feature is very low.

InstantOn exposes the risk of broken webpages

Another commonly used FEO technique is basic dynamical HTML caching, generally referred to as InstantOn.
Typically, HTML <HEAD> sections are cached, however, the process is very manual on the onset with a large number
of rules needing to be created to determine what can be cached versus what elements cannot be cached. In the
absence of a platform that is not adaptive, websites that evolve over time to accommodate different device types
need constant updates and changes to the ruleset in order for headers to be cached appropriately. The net result,
caching headers is extremely manual and exposes the risk of broken pages being received by the end user when old
cached <HEAD> information is sent in advance and completely different HTML arrives from the backend. Therefore,
the apparent performance gains can be high, but the end result is very low reliability.

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FEO Technical Brief

Low Performance,
Low Reliability
In the lower left is the Low Performance, Low Reliability quadrant. These FEO techniques are relatively low risk FEO
features that wont make a great deal of performance impact.

Minification is easily achievable, but not scalable

Basic minification of JavaScript code removes whitespaces and comments to incrementally compress JavaScript files.
This cleansing of JavaScript code is easily achievable, however, is generally not very scalable. As code continues to
change, applying minification techniques to even small code changes will eventually break the site. Therefore, with
low performance benefits and low reliability, there is minimal upside to implementing minification.

Concat of Resources and Inline Small Scripts will fade away with HTTP/2
Similar to minification, other FEO techniques such as concat of resources and inline small scripts provide minimal
performance benefits and are not reliable. In due time and as HTTP/2 begins to be more broadly adopted, FEO
optimizations such as concat of resources, inline small scripts, and other such features will no longer be useful and
may in fact, impair performance. With HTTP/2, header compression and multiplexing will be automatically built into
the protocol, which will trump inline of scripts in HTML and concatenation of scripts and stylesheets, among others.
Not only will these approaches no longer apply with the roll-out of HTTP/2, but in many cases, these HTTP 1.1
optimizations will actually degrade performance.

Low Performance,
High Reliability
In the lower right is the Low Performance, High Reliability quadrant. These FEO approaches are considered to be
safe and low risk, however, their performance impact is quite negligible.

Basic PNG transcoding only provides incremental performance benefits

Basic image optimizations such as PNG transcoding only remove non-visual metadata from images similar to utilities like
PNGcrush. This only provides incremental benefits for the portion of PNG images on a site and ignores JPG images or
newer image formats such as WebP and JPEG XR.

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Copyright 2015 Instart Logic, Inc. All rights reserved.

FEO Technical Brief

Domain Sharding is fading into the distance with the adoption of HTTP/2
Similar to basic PNG image optimizations, Gzip, and domain sharding are generally reliable, but dont do much in the
way of performance improvements. For example, Gzipping, which compresses code is fairly simple to implement, but
the net performance benefit is only incremental. Older FEO features such as domain sharding, which is the process of
serving up more assets from different domains in order to increase the amount of assets that can be downloaded in
parallel, is being phased out with the adoption of HTTP/2.

High Performance,
High Reliability
In comparison to the highly unreliable FEO approaches, Instart Logics machine learning algorithm fully automates and
adapts performance optimizations with no changes to the underlying code. Due to the automated and adaptive nature
of Instart Logics service, it doesnt have the same fundamental flaws of site breakage and high maintenance that FEO
technology does. By applying network and application based optimizations that leverage a machine learning technology,
Instart Logic is able to guarantee high performance, high reliability without the fundamental FEO flaws of site
breakage, high maintenance, and the associated manual nature.

Image Adaptation uses SmartVision to deliver the best image experience

Unlike FEO solutions that resort to permanently reducing the quality of images and are narrowly focused on PNG
images, Instart Logics technology uses a sophisticated image processing technology called SmartVision to enable the
delivery of a wide variety of image formats without impact to quality, speed, and performance for the end user.
With our Smart Vision technology, the Instart Logics service can automatically determine the best image
compression, format, and quality levels for each individual image. In addition, Instart Logics service can analyze
each image on the page and apply a unique transcoding approach to each image as well as resize the image
immediately on the fly, dramatically reducing the size of the image file with no impact to image quality.

HTML Streaming dramatically decreases overall load times

Unlike basic dynamic HTML caching capabilities, Instart Logic has a sophisticated and application-intelligent HTML
streaming feature that is able to distinguish between unique and non-unique dynamic HTML. With this technology,
Instart Logic can stream non-unique dynamic HTML such as metadata, scripts, style sheets, etc. to the browser
immediately while the backend server is generating the unique dynamic HTML, allowing immediate decrease in load
times and an improved user experience. With its machine learning algorithms, Instart Logic also automatically learns
which parts of the HTML are <HEAD> sections and the same across all users, caching those elements and patching in
unique dynamic data, as needed. By being able to load portions of the <HEAD> faster and distinguishing between
unique and non-unique dynamic HTML, the browser can instantaneously start to render a page faster, leading to a
reduction in browser idle time by 80-90%. No manual rules need to be created and the end result is a safer and more
sophisticated approach to dynamic HTML streaming to improve performance.

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Copyright 2015 Instart Logic, Inc. All rights reserved.

FEO Technical Brief

JavaScript Streaming uses machine-learning to intelligently make decisions

Unlike minificaiton of JavaScript or other rudimentary FEO practices for JavaScript optimization which break sites
over time, Instart Logic uses a machine learning technology called SmartSequence, which requires no manipulation
of the underlying code. Utilizing the SmartSequence technology, Instart Logics JavaScript streaming service
understands which JavaScript is actually needed and only sends that down to the browser while caching the
elements of JavaScript that are rarely or never used. Rarely used JavaScript code is on demand loaded. Instart
Logic's JavaScript Streaming features doesn't re-write or alter any source code, but instead simply packages the
most used functions together so the browser can start parsing and executing the code sooner.

JavaScript Interception serves 3rd party code from a single source and reduces additional overhead
The use of 3rd party JavaScript such as ads, social sharing widgets, and analytics has increased dramatically and is
one of the most common points of failure for websites, leading to slow page load times. Instart Logic is the only
application delivery solution on the market that can redirect third party JavaScript through the use of its
cloud-client architecture. Once the content is redirected to Instart Logics service, the third party JavaScript
components take advantage of Instart Logics machine learning technology to intelligently package decisions by
learning how the code is executed. Similar to JavaScript Streaming, JavaScript Interception improves performance
by breaking down 3rd party JavaScript code into fragments and streaming them across in prioritized order, thereby
serving all 3rd party code from a single point and reducing additional overhead.

InstantLoad provides faster repeat visits and multi-page views

With the new storage technologies that now exist in modern web browsers and can deliver increased client storage
and caching performance, Instart Logic has extended its cloud service to enable web technologies to benefit from
this technology transparently and increase page load performance. The InstantLoad service automatically and
intelligently manages client-side storage and cache, placing the most important application elements in
higher-performance, but capacity-limited storage. Based on the discovery and deep understanding of the web
application being delivered, Instart Logics service can transparently redirect critical elements of the application
used in the page rendering process such as CSS and JavaScript to the best storage and cache available on each device.
This provides for faster repeat visits and multi-page views with no changes to the application.

Instart Logic Advantages

About Instart Logic

Instart Logic accelerates cloud application delivery for the worlds most performance-obsessed organizations. Its
unique software-defined application delivery technology solves performance challenges inherent in wireless
connections and makes content delivery networks (CDNs) obsolete. Using Instart Logic, organizations can provide
ultra-fast, visually immersive experiences on any device to maximize revenue, deliver superior customer experiences
and gain competitive advantage.
Instart Logic is funded by Andreessen Horowitz, Greylock Partners, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Sutter Hill Ventures,
Tenaya Capital and several notable Silicon Valley angel investors.
Learn more at http://instartlogic.com or follow us on Twitter at @InstartLogic.

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Copyright 2015 Instart Logic, Inc. All rights reserved.