So I have been working with a company for a little over a year named “Aptimize” whose mission in life is to make SharePoint sites render faster especially when there is sizable distance between the SharePoint servers and the end user. I’ve seen the effects that their software has had on some global deployments of SharePoint for both large and small companies and have to say that the results are nothing short of impressive. Joel Oleson and the Microsoft SharePoint site even use the software. Here is some information from Aptimize on the Microsoft deployment:
Microsoft and Aptimize have made SharePoint 2010 faster. By reducing page load times more than 40%, Microsoft’s website http://sharepoint2010.microsoft.com feels more “snappy”, has faster load times, and consumes half the bandwidth
What we did:
- Added Aptimize Website Accelerator (WAX) to the site
- Hand-optimized the Silverlight controls
This is a standard Aptimize offering, and the same benefits are available to every Aptimize customer
The results
Before optimization, the website load times were:
- 10.5 seconds for domestic visitors
- 13.3 seconds for international visitors
- 1.7 MB in page size
After optimization, the load times:
- Reduced 43% to 5.9 seconds for domestic visitors
- Reduced 54% to 6.1 seconds for international visitors
- Reduced page size 49% to 0.9 MB
- The “start render” (time people see a blank page before it draws) was reduced by half
PageTest results are here:
Original: http://www.webpagetest.org/result/100329_7690d16f562a8416aa7532262c6f2fe7/
Aptimized: http://www.webpagetest.org/result/100329_ef769ed36dddf0e7801627e4ac44dd6c/
This is a great result for Microsoft, giving powerful business benefits very quickly
If you get some time, give their software a test drive. Don’t forget to say that Jeff sent you 
