EdgeCast Networks has announced the beta of its Application Delivery Network, a new global delivery service that dramatically improves the performance and throughput of sites running web applications and serving content that changes in real time.

The service has been under development throughout 2010 and is built upon the company’s distributed global content delivery network. It combines a set of industry “best practice” optimizations with refinements to the company’s core technology to bring significant improvements to the speed and availability of dynamic content and web applications.

“Providing the performance benefits of a distributed CDN platform to non-cacheable applications is in high demand for interactive, personalized, and commerce-oriented web sites,” said Ted Middleton, vice president of product management at EdgeCast Networks. “We have made significant R&D investments in new technology, software optimizations, and network tuning to extend our leading performance into this space.”

Beta testing indicates that customers can expect to see performance improvements in the 200% - 400% range for applications that would not have benefitted from traditional edge caching.

The company invested heavily in new infrastructure and capacity to support the new service, including the deployment of updated server configurations with solid state drives (SSD), very large amounts of memory, and multiple gigabits per second of network throughput each.

Further refinements to memory and disc I/O operations and expanded support for multi-CPU and multi-core processors mean faster throughput for every unit of capacity. Additionally, many established industry “best practice” optimization techniques based on RFC-compliant tuning of TCP/IP and HTTP were integrated into the new platform, which also supports SSL acceleration.

“This combination of many small improvements leads to a dramatic leap in capability and enables new classes of service for previously unaddressable applications,” said Middleton.

While the new service will bring the most significant improvements to applications and the delivery of their transactions to the end user, static content deployed on the new platform will also realize performance improvements. This dual-mode capability will improve support for “whole site” delivery implementations where static and dynamic content are not easily separable.

The company is now working with several of its customers to test the platform and expects the service to be generally available by the first quarter of 2011.