How CDNs Reduce Latency by Serving Web Content From Servers Near Users
A Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a globally distributed system of servers designed to deliver web content to users from locations geographically closer to them. Without a CDN, every user request — regardless of origin — travels to a single origin server, causing higher latency, heavier server load, and slower performance at scale. CDNs address this by caching static assets like images, CSS, and JavaScript files on edge servers, also known as Points of Presence (PoPs), spread across the world. When a user requests content, the nearest edge server checks its cache; a cache hit returns the content instantly, while a cache miss fetches it from the origin and stores a local copy for future requests. This architecture allows a single origin server to offload millions of repeated requests, making it a critical component in building large-scale, high-performance web systems.
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