Case Study: Zacks Investment Research achieves scalable, high-performance web delivery with F5 Networks

Zacks.com Supports Rapid Business Growth, Increased Traffic Loads with F5 solutions

Zacks Investment Research, a Chicago‑headquartered investment research firm known for Zacks Rank and web tools like its stock screener, faced rapidly growing, irregular traffic (30–40% annual growth and several million hits monthly) that strained its web infrastructure and threatened availability and scalability. To address this, Zacks turned to F5 Networks and its BIG‑IP Local Traffic Manager (BIG‑IP LTM) appliances to provide intelligent, layer‑7 traffic management.

F5 Networks deployed a pair of BIG‑IP LTM 1600 devices using iRules plus integrated caching, compression and SSL termination to centralize traffic control and offload functions from web servers. The F5 solution simplified management, boosted scalability and performance, isolated heavy screener and crawler traffic, enabled session tracking for monetization, and freed about 1 GB of memory per server by offloading caching — allowing Zacks.com to handle surges, support new product distribution and maintain high availability.

Zacks Investment Research

Chris Dunlop

Manager, Networks and Infrastructure