What functionality does the Dispatcher provide?

The Dispatcher is a core component of Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) that primarily focuses on optimizing the delivery of web content and enhancing performance. The functionality it provides includes caching, load-balancing, and security.

Caching plays a crucial role in the Dispatcher by temporarily storing frequently requested content. This reduces the load on the AEM publish instance, ensuring that users experience faster page load times. By serving cached content instead of generating it dynamically from the back end for every request, the Dispatcher significantly improves web performance.

Load-balancing is another essential feature of the Dispatcher. It distributes incoming requests across multiple AEM instances, which helps prevent any single server from becoming overwhelmed with traffic. This not only enhances performance and reliability but also provides high availability and better resource utilization.

Security is also a key aspect of the Dispatcher’s role. It helps protect backend AEM servers from potentially malicious requests by acting as a barrier, ensuring that only valid and safe requests reach the published content.

In conclusion, the combination of caching, load-balancing, and security makes the Dispatcher a vital tool within AEM for optimizing content delivery and enhancing the overall user experience.