ESI stands for Edge Side Include and is an XML-based markup language. ESI support is offered by content delivery network (CDN) vendors like Akamai and F5 and also now Varnish (but only a very limited subset). If you use any of these vendors, you have ESI at your disposal. ESI can be used for caching purposes, however, in today’s post I will focus on how it could help you with your mobile strategy and performance.

The W3C states:
“ESI allows for dynamic content assembly at the edge of the network, whether it is in a Content Delivery Network, end-user’s browser, or in a “Reverse Proxy” right next to the origin server.” (http://www.w3.org/TR/esi-lang)

So, let’s pay attention to “dynamic content assembly” in the context of the title’s blog post.

If you are familiar with Server-Side-Include (SSI) and XML/XSLT, you will have no problem understanding ESI. It also supports the same access to variables based on HTTP request attributes, e.g. you can easily check for HTTP_USER_AGENT or HTTP_HEADER. ESI can also include fragments or snippets of additional content via an include command. To make this even more powerful, ESI supports conditional processing, which means logic can be applied to execute specific content <include/>s based on specific conditions, e.g. user agents. All of this is done at the edge; the user will never get content they are not supposed to receive. Additionally, when processing ESI, there is no need to go back to the origin for processing, hence the load at the origin is cut down.

What is (your) Mobile Strategy?

A mobile strategy or approach could range from “We don’t have one”, or “We swear on responsive web design” to “We take mobile very seriously and have dedicated sites”. If you opt for the first statement, please read this and then come back. If you opt for the second or third statement, please continue reading. While there are several options out there to do device detection via PHP or any other server-side language, I’d like to provide several insights on how the same can be achieved with ESI. Similar to other redirect strategies out there, ESI can be used to redirect users to a different site based on the visitor’s user agent. The redirect occurs at the edge and is faster than putting the redirect logic at the origin, hence, you experience performance improvements. ESI is powerful and cheap tool, and your way to a proper mobile device strategy could work by following the steps below.

To continue, please go to my guest post for Stoyan’s perf calendar, December 3: http://calendar.perfplanet.com/2013/esi-mobile-strategy-performance/