“This AJAX thing you are speaking of, will it do us anything good, on our brand spanking new site?”

Yes, it will.

AJAX as an acronym for Asynchronus Javascript And XML. Basically it means that when a web page is done loading the user/page can still interact with the server, without experiencing the page refresh.

Recently we used this to great effect on a clients website to help reduce the load on the underlying database servers. One of the servers was an old Oracle machine, and when the website experienced a lot of visitors, the Oracle machine went bonkers and produced a heap of errors and the website ended up crashing.

The reason for the errors was two connections from the front page to the server, getting two different kinds of information.

One of the database connections was updated to cache its information in the web application, and the other was set to load via AJAX.

The result?

A factor 10 reduction of errors, and the oracle database is yet to produce errors when called from the ajax script. On top of that, users experience a faster load of the front page, since they don’t have to wait for the connection to the oracle server, which is somewhat slow compared to the mssql database the CMS is running on.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 22nd, 2007 at 2:36 pm and is filed under Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.