Modem Accelerators?

An Anonymous Coward asks: "I was browsing on the web and came across a reference to Coastal Web Online's claim of a modem accelerator Apparently it is a service which is supposed to make your modem 3x faster. Is this possible? I've already got a v.92 modem and I thought it already did compression. It is possible it is a proxy doing some compression on white space in HTML or something, but I don't think so, since it apparently only works with Windows 9x and Internet Exploder. For $8.00 a month ontop a the dialup access sounds kinda snake oilish. Does anybody on Slashdot use the service? Would they recommend it? This sounds remarkably similar to the old idea of 'waxing your modem'. Am I missing out on something here?"

Comments

How to modem accelerate as a webmaster

[proxybyproxy]

The best thing I ever did for my modem users, was to install mod_gzip, which compresses every page (be that HTML or any dynamically generated PHP page) apache sends out.

Result? Up to 92% compression! My pages are loading so much faster than before, AND I am saving on my bandwidth bill.

Installation is a breeze, the mod is a beauty.

- the mod_gzip project
- scoop article on mod_gzip
- some stats for intune.org

Re:How to modem accelerate as a webmaster

[Tower]

If the pages are static content, A) can be relieved with caching of the gzipped pages. If you are generating dynamic content (via DB lookups, etc), you'll have more of a hit, but relative to the the lookup time, the gzipping is fairly quick.

B) you may be stuck with, but on a P100/64MB playing 192kb MP3s while surfing to a fairly involved site (say 500kB/page) the time saved over the link will more than make up for the decompression (yes, I've tried this myself). There was a large discussion on this quite some time ago (probably close to a year), and if the proc isn't pegged on the server, the client still saves time...

Quick numbers for an actual page (366858 bytes):
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/03/ 04/204622 6&mode=nested
Raw page transfer: 366858 Bytes /(5kB/s) = ~71.65s

Gzip time: .3us on a 375Mhz PPC RS/6k with .7 load
Transfer time: 66240 Bytes / (5kB/s) = ~12.94s
So, unless the client will spend more than a minute to decompress this file, you will be saving time... decompressing a few .gif/.png/.jpgs for a page will be just as costly...