Citrix Application Delivery Controller (ADC) delivers applications and content for some of the internet’s largest companies and thousands of customers. To ensure the best user experience, Citrix is continually improving the product’s performance to meet the demands of modern applications and environments. Recent tests by Tolly Group, an independent third party, confirmed the leadership of Citrix ADC over other solutions when it comes to performance and latency.
Tolly Group Testing Shows Citrix ADC Superiority in All Scenarios
The Tolly Group conducted two sets of tests for the Citrix ADC portfolio in different environments:
- Citrix ADC VPX vs. F5 BIGIP-VE for hybrid multi-cloud deployment
- Citrix ADC CPX vs. open source Envoy Proxy for cloud-native environments
In both benchmarks Citrix ADC outperformed its competitors in every test for latency, throughput, and CPU utilization.
In its report (Tolly report #221100) that compared Citrix VPX with F5 VE, Tolly stated that “Citrix ADC VPX delivers better results than F5 BIG-IP in every variant of every test.” According to the report, Citrix ADC delivers:
- 1/5 the latency of F5 in HTTPS data throughput tests
- 1/2 the latency of F5 in HTTPS transaction tests
- Up to 1.85 billion more HTTPS transactions in 24 hours
- Lower latency and CPU than F5 with WAF enabled
When compared with Envoy Proxy (Tolly report #221101), Tolly reported that “Citrix ADC CPX outperformed the Envoy Proxy in all test scenarios having lower latency and higher throughput and transaction rates.”
Citrix ADC CPX delivers:
- Only 13 percent of the latency of Envoy Proxy in HTTPS data throughput tests
- Up to 2.3X data throughput of Envoy Proxy in HTTPS tests
- Up to 3.2X transaction rate of Envoy Proxy in HTTPS transaction tests
For more information on the test methodology and complete results please see the individual reports.
Why Does It Matter?
In today’s application dominated economy, application experience is frequently synonymous with user experience. And with many businesses competing largely, or wholly, on experience, delivering applications quickly and efficiently is paramount to success.
Latency Matters
Latency is crucial to application performance, and every millisecond counts. Because the effect of latency is cumulative, a small difference on every request soon adds up and can severely impact application experience.
- Amazon found that each additional 100 ms of page load time cost them 1 percent in sales.
- Google found that an extra 0.5 seconds in search page generation time dropped search traffic by 20 percent.
- Brokers can lose $4 million in revenues per millisecond of delay that they’re behind their competitors
- Akamai reported that a 2 second delay in web page load time increased bounce rate by 100 percent.
In today’s modern economy, latency is not an option. It costs you money, so it is vital to use an ADC that minimizes latency.
The effect of latency is compounded in microservices-based applications because every communication between microservices is now effectively a network request. Your choice of proxy is critical to minimizing the impact of added latency on application experience.
Performance Counts
Like latency, ADC performance and CPU utilization are important to the delivery of your applications. The Tolly reports highlight the power of Citrix ADC’s single pass architecture for WAF inspection, which reduced the latency of each requests dramatically and consumed a lot less CPU.
Similarly, the more efficient use of CPU meant that Citrix ADC can process substantially more HTTPS requests (up to 1.8 B in 24 hours!) than its competitors. That can result in the use of fewer, smaller devices, which, in turn, can reduce costs.
Download the reports today to learn more about Tolly Group’s findings.
