A publisher's Marfeel mobile site is delivered through a CDN (content delivery network). The CDN used is Fastly that equips Marfeel with servers all over the world to bring a publisher's content as close to the user as possible.

Pre-warming the CDN

For a CDN to effectively deliver content at fast speeds, it needs to be pre-warmed with some traffic because they do lazy-caching.

Whenever a user accesses a site with a CDN, the content is served from a server that is geographically near to the user called points of presence (POP). 

Points of presence will keep a copy of the content served from the origin for a concrete period of time (caching time or TTL). During this caching time, if another user requests the content from the same POP, it will be served almost instantly from the cache. 

When there's no traffic, a request to an edge server must always make an extra round trip to the origin server. This is what can create initial short-lived lags in speed. 

Brand new go live speed

When a publisher activates their Marfeel mobile site and goes live, there may not be any traffic on that point of presence and therefore no initial cached content for a publisher's website, causing an extra round trip to the origin server. As traffic increases however, speed and load time will increase dramatically to the instantaneous standard Marfeel provides. 

Demo speed

All Marfeel demos and implementation demonstrations are delivered through a link. This means there is almost zero traffic and that the CDN is not pre-warmed, potentially causing slow speeds during these presentations.