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

Re:How to modem accelerate as a webmaster

[HyPeR_aCtIvE]

I read a bit on this, and it does seem to have two drawbacks, that noone ever mentions:

A) It takes more processor power on your webserver. It has to constantly compress files to send ... on a highly loaded webserver, this can make for alot of extra processor overhead.

B) It takes more processor power on the client. Well the client's gotten it quickly, but now it has to uncompress it. On a massively overpowered machine that is only running a web client at the time, not a problem. But perhaps problems for people with older machines, or running lots of stuff at the time.

I'm stuck on pots

[tkrabec]

I've been toying with setting up a compressed SSH stream to my webserver and installing Squid on that. I server a few small sites so Processing power is not a big deal. I'm not too sure that SSH will help me much. I've already installed a local Squid server and I block ads, that helps a bunch. I'd love to get more Idea's.

-- Tim