Improving Performance on the Internet.

The article discusses the manner in which performance of the Internet may be improved by building scalable and fast content-delivery systems. The biggest bottleneck related to the performance of commercial-grade Web applications, the author states, is the "middle mile," or the amount of time data takes to travel the Internet between the origin server and the end user. Other topics include the middle mile as a heterogeneous infrastructure that is owned by competing entities and the peering and transit points where networks trade traffic.