What does Autotune do?

Autotune finds the right Ingress Rate for your domain by sampling the performance of your pages. Think of it as a continual load test, using live traffic to ascertain the right rate to send users from your Waiting Room to your website.


How does Autotune know how my website is performing?

When using a JavaScript integration, Autotune uses browser performance metrics to look at page load times. When using our DNS implementation, Autotune looks at the load times from the pages it is proxying. If you do your own server side integration, you will send performance information via the API. It’s up to you to specify what acceptable performance looks like using the ‘acceptable page load’ and ‘acceptable percentage’ settings. The defaults are 5,000ms and 2%, meaning your website performance is considered acceptable when 98% of page loads are taking less than 5 seconds to load.


Why does Autotune dial the Ingress Rate down when there is low traffic?

Autotune plays it safe by setting a rate that is commensurate with demand to your domain, and then raising the rate as the demand increases. This allows any load protection measures your website might have in place, in terms of caching or auto-scaling, to take effect, rather than being shocked by spikes in demand. As your website adapts to demand it may well be able to perform better, allowing Autotune to increase the rate.