Earlier this month, Limelight Networks announced the fastest purge to date by its SmartPurge system: it removed 1.1 billion cached objects equaling 612 terabytes of data across the company’s global network in 123 milliseconds.
Such speed is significant. Traditional ways of removing content from the globally distributed edge servers of a CDN can be a complicated, slow, and inconsistent process. Users receive stale or damaged content when a purge takes too long to process. Brand integrity can be compromised and compliance issues can arise when outdated information is still available and corrupted files are downloaded as a result of slow removal of online content.
“The ability to remove online content quickly and easily can protect revenue, ensure positive customer experiences and save you money,” said Steve Miller-Jones, Senior Director of Product Management at Limelight Networks in a press release. “SmartPurge is just one example of Limelight’s innovative and industry leading content delivery solutions that improve our customers’ workflow and provide flexibility, speed and peace of mind.”
SmartPurge allows companies to delete any kind of content, from bad software files to outdated pricing on a website, and prevent it from being served to end-users.
SmartPurge’s other industry-leading features include:
- Near Real-Time Speed: It takes less than two seconds for purged objects to be invalidated or deleted
- Flexibility: API and Limelight’s Control Portal offer multiple ways to perform purges, including: by pattern matching, targeting content labelled with custom tags, specific content types, single URLs or objects and entire directories
- Instantaneous Confirmation and Reporting: Confirmation reports are delivered within 20 seconds of the purge being submitted
- Global Scale: Limelight’s purging system is architected to execute purges at a global scale
- Dry Run: This feature allows for a dry run of the purge before it goes into effect, offering insights into the impact of a job before it is run and potentially preventing the purging of incorrect items. All the objects are counted during a dry run but none are yet invalidated or evicted.
SmartPurge has been part of Limelight’s stable for several years, and was awarded a Global Business Excellence Award in 2016 for innovations that significantly improve workflows. It was the second consecutive year that Limelight won the award for Outstanding New Product/Service. SmartPurge was recognized for its singular capacity to let companies delete content from their cache anywhere in the world in seconds.
The chairman of the judges at that time said: “Limelight Networks is transforming the digital world with its fantastic new SmartPurge product that can remove any unwanted online content instantly. Typically, this process would take hours, which could cause lasting damage to a company’s business… This is an impressively intelligent system that is fast, reliable and keeps the client in the know simply and professionally.”