Trick that cut our site load times by 40% without a CDN upgrade

We were paying through the nose for enterprise fiber from Comcast Business and still getting 3 second load times on our main site. Tried route optimization, tried peering agreements, nothing stuck. Then our network guy noticed our BGP was advertising 20+ routes to the same IP block. Consolidated it down to 3 paths and it was like flipping a switch. Has anyone else seen junk route tables kill performance?

2 comments

2 Comments

thea_chen29d ago

Hold on, I think there's a small mixup with the terminology. BGP doesn't really use route tables the same way a routing table on a router does. BGP is about how your network talks to other networks, not the internal path your traffic takes to your own server. Consolidating BGP paths would mainly affect how traffic gets handed off to your ISP, not how fast a page loads after that. If you saw a big speedup, it might have been because the junk routes were causing your traffic to bounce through slower transit providers before reaching your data center.

jenkins.wade29d ago

Saw a talk once where they said most BGP issues come from bad ISP peering.