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New Breed Of Web Accelerators Actually Work
axlrosen writes "Web accelerators first came around years ago, and they didn't live up to the hype. Now TV commercials are advertising accelerators that speed up your dial-up connection by up to 5 times, they say. AOL and EarthLink throw them in for free; some ISPs charge a monthly fee. Tests by
PC World, PC Magazine and CNET show that they do speed up your surfing quite a bit. They work by using improved compression and caching. The downside is they don't help streaming video or audio." And they require non-Free software on the client's end, too.
Unfortunately, these caches store only the most accessed pages, so anything of any value to the Slashdot audience will be as slow as ever. But you can be sure your porn will be delivered at 5x the speed of your normal dial-up! (yawn)
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"Web accelerators"...You mean highly-advanced technology like mod-gzip?
There are a huge number of yeast infections in this county. Probably because we're downriver from the bread factory.
They require non-Free software?
Well, why don't you go ahead and write some Free software to accomplish the same thing?
My GameCube requires non-Free software too.
Wahhhh
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
come on- how many of you are over dial-up *right now*?
that's what i thought...
I browse at +5 Flamebait- moderation for all or moderation for none.
get broadband. This will definitely help places that still don't have broadband. But, if broadband is available, it's a no-brainer. I'd rather spend a few bucks more and get broadband, rather than be stuck with some kind of software that may or may not speed up the access depending on what it is.
Why so many content providers aren't using gzip compression? The cpu time required is MUCH cheaper than the bandwidth, AND it makes users happiers because they get it faster. Oh, and it's free (for Apache anyway) and easy to set up. It even works with 99% of browsers these days.
And they require non-Free software on the client's end, too.
And I'll just bet that none of that software includes any popups, spyware or intrusive monitoring!
This seems like a really niche market nowadays. Not _too_ many people that need fast internet, that could use this, don't have broadband availible. The one key thing is price, which is even starting to get iffy.
/. or pr0n that much fast, it works, tell me if I am wrong, but I am seeing a small market for this much hype
Something like $10-20 monthly for "speedy" earhtlink dial-up, or an extra $10-20 slapped on my monthly cable bill for broadband? (Charter Communications, they suck anyways)
I guess if you need to read
Error 407 - No creative sig found
They actually work?
Next thing they find out is the new generation of penis enlargement devices actually work, too...
I don't need a signature.
OMG, not that! I know this won't get much play here, but I don't care if it's free or not as long as it works. I use the Free software that I do because it is better than Fee software, not because it is free. Shame on me for not being an ideologue.
It's just the old tradeoff between CPU power (decompression time) and bandwidth usage (download time). Much easier (and more smartly) implemented on the server side with something like mod_gzip, like HungWeiLo said.
And graphic compression's been done before too, since around AOL 3.0 or so. Most people turn it off because it makes pages look like crap.
Snake oil that works? What do you even call something like that?
My former company was checking out NetAccelerator recently to resell to our clients.
These things are a joke. The primary performance increase comes from recompressing images into really nasty JPEGs. AOL was doing this years ago (and getting blasted for it). If you turn that off, the performance improvement is not even measurable.
Furthermore, you tend to get a lot of stale caches on your machine. Most browsers don't even get this right, so they add yet another layer of potentially buggy cache abstraction.
No, these things are junk. They act as proxy servers and their source is closed. How can you trust them to handle your data? Even with all their compression features turned on, the performance improvement is seriously overrated. Don't bother. You simply cannot get something for nothing in cases like these.
Now, what would improve the download speed of the web is if web designers would start building standards compliant markup. Many web sites have as much as 700kb overhead in markup from tools that create loads of font tags and their ilk. Pure XHTML + CSS layout would do a hell of a lot more to speed up the web than these scams. Of course, don't take my word for it--read Zeldman.
Join Tor today!
They compress the packets of data. Where will this help? In compressible places that aren't already compressed. Such as the HTML markup for webpages. This wont help already compressed JPGs, or already compressed MP3s or already compressed ZIP/GZIP files or already compressed videos (MPG/AVI/ASF). So is this really going to help much? Sure, there is always going to be a small percent of space (and therefore time) saved even transferring these formats. Is it going to make a 5X difference? No. Is it going to make a noticeable difference? It's unlikely but possible. The only way this "new technology" is going to help is if you are a dialup user without broadband options.
rproxy is a really interesting project, and back when I tried it over a 56K dial-up connection, it did actually work to speed things up. You sit an rproxy web cache at each end of the dial-up connection (so you need somewhere to deply your custom proxy to make it work, but bear with me...) and then request web pages as usual. Each end caches the pages that pass through it, but the clever part is that when you re-request a page, the proxy at the far end (on the fast connection) can fetch the page and compare with the last copy in the cache. Then it transmits only the differences using the rsync algorithm. Unforunately it's not being actively developed any more given the increasing availability of high-bandwidth connections, and the decreasing fraction of web traffic that is suitable for delta-compression. Shame, since it did seem to be a real "web accelerator" without any of the illusory techniques used by the garish banner-ad accelerators.
Matthew @ Bytemark Hosting
mod_gzip is manna from heaven
I turned mine off by accident once and got a phone call from the co-lo wanting to know why I was suddenly maxing out.
gotta love that 70% saving.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
I don't want to start a holy war here, but what the hell is up with you AOL zealots? Ive been sitting at my Freinds gig of a AOL box for 20 minutes while it attempts to download a 17Mb avi file! 20 Minutes! At home, on my NTL box the same operation would take 2 minutes if that.
Also, during this transfer, Winamp won't work, and everything else schreeches to a halt, even mozillabrid 0.8 is struggling to keepup as I type this. I won't bother you with the laundry basket of other problems. My old 9600 Baud connection to BT works faster than this AOL connection at times, in 2003!
AOL addicts, flame me if you like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why I should use AOL over faster, cheaper ISPs.
ISPs could simply put some squid caches between the net and their dial-up banks. Turn mod_gzip on and you'll accomplish a lot of the same thing.
.diffs came across. :-)
Instead of having to traverse the Internet, with all the associated latency, pages are pulled locally - 1 hop away. Pages are also compressed.
A better way would be to figure out how to transfer pages via CVS, so only
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
GIFs, JPEGs, MPEGs, and MP3s are already compressed, so compression doesn't make them any smaller. That really leaves only HTTP, HTML and CSS to benefit from compression. And caching only helps if you're in the habit of looking at the same pages multiple times... so where's the benefit for the average porn-downloading, RIAA-infringing geek? Does it speculatively preread links before I click on them?
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
You can get the same thing you looked at yesterday 5x faster!!
Caching and compression will only get you so far before lossiness (sp?) kicks in and you start getting garbage, or caching works so well you get the same page every time you load it.
Get on the bandwagon and chip the money for Broadband if you're looking to boost your speeds. If you can't get a/v any faster, really, what's the point?
Low bandwidth main pages becoming less and less prevalent so it's not going to do you much anyway, plus, you're still paying for it...
I hate WiFiPods now!
It turns out they arent Free!
Imagine my dismay!
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Okay, so GIFs, JPGs, streaming video, ZIPs, and compressed .EXE installers are all already compressed near to their thoretical limits.
[Puts cynics hat on]
The vendors mentioned in the PCWorld article seem to be treading dangerously close to copyright infringement by compressing other people's content on their servers to be pulled through their browser proxy.
NetZero and Earthlink apparently force you to use their proprietary internet-access layer, so how are we sure their extra-cost "Super" speed isn't just normal internet speed, and their "Base" speed isn't just slowed down by the interface layer?
[Takes cynics hat off]
The only thing here that seems like it would be genuinely useful is HTML compression... surely there is/will-be an Open Source solution for this. Maybe a new MIME type, e.g. text/html.compressed? Then it could be implemented on both the browser and server side, and this would have far greater impact. This could be implemented either in the browser itself or in a lightweight proxy like Proxomitron. Anyone? Anyone?
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
I wonder if all this is worth the effort. For instance, Bell canada offers low speed dsl which is capped around 25 KB/s ~= 5x dial-up for only a couple dollars more than regular dial up. When you add in the fact that you don't have to tie up the phone line, and the other advantages of DSL such as high speed on all pages, not just frequently visited ones, you really have to wonder why anyone uses dial up at all anymore.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
OK -- now you'vegot my attention. Like, um... just how nasty?
Roving Web-Teleoperated Robot
Caching webpages in a proxy is something all ISPs do. The downside is that whenever I've used an ISPs squid proxy, it slowed things down! Turning proxies off almost invariably helps speeds, in stead of hurting them. Plus, if the proxy goes down, you can still use the web. I have no idea why ISP's proxies are so craptastic (YMMV), but in my experience, they are. (BTW, it would help if windowsupdate was cacheable..)
;-) Not such a good approach for webbrowsing btw.
.ART format when you used their client? Do they still?
Compression.. Now there's something! I have in the past used an ssh tunnel (with compression switched on) to my university's web proxy, and that sped up things quite a bit! Why isn't this switched on by default on my PPPoA connection? Doesn't apache handle gzip'ing these days? Doesn't seem to be used much, though.. This speed up might be less pronounced on dial-up links though, because POTS modems usually switch on compression anyway (again YMMV).
Some download accelerators simply download different chunks of the same file in multiple sessions from either one server (shouldn't matter - unless with roundrobin DNS) or even from mirrors (better!). That's quite effective as well, but we know this, and that's why we use bittorrent for big files, don't we?
But it has to be said.. Most download accelerators are just bloaty spyware and don't do *zilch* to help your download speed.. Feh!
Didn't AOL use to convert GIF graphics to their own, lossy,
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
What ever happened to that Xwebs browser written by some 16 year old kid, that was a total scam, I mean, supposedly sped up web surfing lots ?
In Soviet America the banks rob you!
You admit that a $200,000 setup fee isn't "a few bucks more." Thank you; most people miss this.
But what about people who are so mobile that they need to be able to jack in and access the Internet from any of several locations, and they can't afford the price of a broadband subscription for each location? I was in just that situation for four years. Dial-up has the advantage of a last mile in almost every home in the States, brought to you by the Universal Service Tax, meaning that no matter whose house I was visiting, I could always plug my laptop into the wall and dial my Verizon Online account.
Will I retire or break 10K?
WOW, a webcache and real-time compression!
.v42Bis compression have only been able to do that for, what, nearly a decade?
My browser and my modem with
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
Grandparent was referring to the $10-$20/mo marginal cost of broadband over the $20/mo national median cost of dial-up. Under this, broadband would cost $30-$40, in line with your observation.
Will I retire or break 10K?
I worked at a local ISP who managed to get a demo for a cache server a while back. (I don't anymore.) The machine arrived. We plugged it in, and started to take tech calls.
Basically, it proxied all requests through that ISP on port 80. If it found a request to an IP or sitename it had visited before, it tried to serve it out of cache. If it didn't, it proxied the result through and returned the results from the requested IP or sitename.
The problems:
The server had a difficult time with virtual hosting of any kind. About 4 out of 5 requests to a virtual host would go through. About 20% of the time, there was some critical piece of information that the cache server would mangle so that the vhost mechanism would be unable to serve the right data. This was a couple years ago, so bugfixes might have happened. Maybe.
The server definitely had a hard time with dynamic content that wasn't built with a GET url (thus triggering the pass-thru proxy). If the request was posted, encrypted, hashed, or referenced a server side directive of some kind (server-side redirects were a nasty) the cache would fail. A server side link equating something like "http://www.server.net/redirect/" to a generated URL or dynamic content of some kind was the most frequent case we rean into with this. The server simply couldn't parse each and every http request or every variety and try to decide if it should pass-thru or not. I can't think of a logical way around this that wouldn't break any given implimentation. Can you?
We used dynamically assigned IPs at the time, so proxy requests made from one PC were often returned erroneously to another assuming the IP changed between usage. Say a modem hangup, etc. This was a rare event, but I listened to at least one person complaining that he was getting someone else's Hotmail. The fix to this is either to blacklist sites from being cached-- infeasible for every site that could possibly be requested-- or assign static IPs. DHCP broadband users may have similar problems, especially for those who have new IPs every so often.
Finally, if something got corrpted on the cache server due to disk error, stalled transfer, or some other reason, the sever had little or no way to throw out the bad data. It would throw out data that it *knew* was corrupt due to unfinished downloads, etc... , but often times this check failed or data was assumed to be correct even when it wasn't. Everyone who requested the same piece of corrupt data got it. I had to answer this statement a few times. "I downloaded it on one computer connected to your ISP and got a bad download. I downloaded it on my other computer from the same ISP and got the same bad download. Then I connected to another ISP from the first computer and got a complete download. What's up wit' dat, yo?"
Cache servers are a bad idea. The very idea is to try to be an end-all be-all to everyone who uses them. There are bug-fixes to some of the problem, but no way to solve the essential problem of the fact that MOST data on the web is dynamic now. Using cache servers with dynamic data is inviting difficulty and problem.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
They compress the packets of data. Where will this help? In compressible places that aren't already compressed. Such as the HTML markup for webpages. This wont help ... already compressed ZIP/GZIP files
In properly set-up Apache installations, aren't HTML files "already compressed GZIP files"?
The only way this "new technology" is going to help is if you are a dialup user without broadband options.
Or if dial-up with this compressing proxy is $25/mo, broadband is $50/mo, and you have several mouths to feed. Or if you have to get online from several locations.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Great, more network devices for me to figure out...HTTP tunneling is a pain, especially when you have things out there like Microsoft's ISA Proxy, which drops cookies from the request when it feels like it...
And for those of you who have broadband that you use to run an HTTP server on---have you considered using mod_gzip? It will let you serve more with less, which is a very good thing if you ever get linked to from slashdot.
Well, you got it all wrong. AOL is not for people who want to connect to the Internet. It was never intended to. It's for people who like living in golden cages or disneyland. That's what it's for. Basically it's a LAN with a popup-forcing adselling-machine. No way would anyone use it to surf the web. The Internet was thrown in as added value in the mid90s when the "superinformation highway" was the buzzword of the day. Much the same as today they are inclduing spamfilters that are substandard. It's all about the hype.
;-)
I would even tend to suspect that the Illuminati are involved (ever recodgnized the pyramid logo?). It must be some sort of conspiracy, after all they act like a newage-church giving away all those free CD-ROMs.
There are two free software projects building web accelerator proxies. One is RabbIT . The other is ziproxy. They are both web proxies which do not require any special software on the client side. They both compress HTML by gzip, and compress images into lower quality JPEG's. RabbIT is written in JAVA whereas ziproxy is written in C. RabbIT has more features than ziproxy, such as caching and removing ads. Give them a try if you're using a slow line! Disclaimer: I'm a ziproxy user and developer.
Will a web-accelerator accelerate make my broadband connection five times faster?
Why are the Slashsnot Mods running stories like THIS CRAP but not even a mention that Edward Teller died yesterday. Just goes to show you that the mods are BRAIN DEAD SCRIPT KIDDIES.
If they're so good, why isn't this first post?!
I looked into both Net Zero Hi-Speed and Earthlink Plus a couple of months ago. I thought they worked. However, both services require that you use Internet Explorer. I would have switched to one of these services, but it wasn't worth switching to IE.
"My girlfriend's got sodium laureth sulfate hair."
Netzero offered this a while ago (maybe they still do). Basically it does speed up loading of pages greatly, however there is a drawback, and a big one at that, the pictures look like crap. The GIFs/JPEGs/etc are compressed. Compressed so much to the extent that they look like, for lack of better terms, crap. A rule of thumb applies here, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. You really cant expect broadband speed for the cost of a dial up, and if you do I have some lovely penis pills to sell you for the low low price of 69.95.
The web could be faster if web server admins used faster web servers. Zeus Web Server instead of Apache, for example. The Holy Grail of web serving seems to be "good enough is good enough, and performance is someone else's problem".
At least one spyware internet accelerator had indications that it did payload compression via RFC 2394. The really evil thing was that it also acted as a proxy for all HTTP and HTTPS traffic and analyzed it all. It knew exactly what you shopped for online and what you paid for it, it also knew your credit card information and online banking information (if you used those services). They definitely used the shopping information, I'm not sure if they used the other information.
RFC 2394 - IP Payload Compression Using DEFLATE
www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2394.htm
The way to ween the American public off dial-up is to offer tiered cable modem services. Say Comcast offers AOL for the same price as dial-up service, with guaranteed 128kbps downstream/56kbps upstream. Or barebones ISP (sans AOL or any other *content-enhancements*) for $19.99 per month. The cable companies would even steal customers away from Netzero and the like by appealing to the fact that there's no need for a dedicated telephone line anymore for internet access. But nope, the cable companies would rather try to charge the flat $40 plus per month on *broadband* speeds that not everyone actually wants. I wish Comcast would raise their downstreams back to @home speeds which were 3Mbps instead of the current 1.5Mbps for those of us that actually are content with paying $40+ per month for broadband. They'd [the cable companies] also beat out their other competitors [DirecTV and Dish] if they'd simply offer a la carte choices for television programming but it seems like they'd rather fight with Sen. McCain until the government forces the issue upon themselves. A la carte digital cable at reasonable prices coupled with the elimination of analog cable would cut out cable piracy as well as their competitors if they'd only practice common sense. Giving up their *stupid* monopoly (like Bell Telephone renting telephones to customers) on renting set-top boxes and going for the retail channel of Joe Consumer purchasing their set-top box would also improve their fortunes...
"Right now, somewhere in this world, Scott Baio is plowing a woman he doesn't love," - Peter Griffin, *Family Guy*
That's about all the article had to say:
Tests by PC World, PC Magazine and CNET show
These are the same magazines with full color, multi-page reviews of the new 0.025% faster hardware. They are the same magazines that review each micro$oft product and say that the TCO is lower than ever before. Take one look at any of their websites, and you will see:
These magazines are Advertisements
Taking anything from them seriously is like taking a presidential speech to be a serious economic discussion, or taking a realtor's web-site as gospel in the market.
Funny - just went to CNET.com to research my post, and guess what? Over 50% of the page is advertising. The rest is 'reviews' of which 100% have links to affiliate programs to purchase said hard/software and give a kickback to CNET.
They will try hard to sell anything, and get their commission. It's like they are the used car salesman of the internet - only everything is new and they don't look you in the eyes when lying to you.
Remember the old 24/96 modems? V.42bis compression? MNP 5-10? Yeah and like they said mod_gzip. My Motorola phone has "compression" software so the measley 9.6kbps connection isn't so bad when trying to get e-mail to my laptop. (TDMA phone)
Cache servers are a bad idea. The very idea is to try to be an end-all be-all to everyone who uses them. There are bug-fixes to some of the problem, but no way to solve the essential problem of the fact that MOST data on the web is dynamic now. Using cache servers with dynamic data is inviting difficulty and problem.
Cache servers are NOT a bad idea, they are a GREAT idea, and for this reason they are in wide use. I don't know what cache engine you were using, but it sure sounds like it sucked. Cache engines from Cisco and Network Appliance are said to be good. The open source squid proxy is an EXCELLENT cache engine from my experience, and I've yet to see any problems similar to what you've described. I've had squid in use at my kids school for the last year without any problems, and have been using it here at home for at least 3-4 years. It too can be configured to not download ads from known ad sources (like Doubleclick).
Using something like squid is very useful in a school environment especially. A teacher tells the class to all load a web page and it's only fetched from the web once, then all students are served it via the high speed cache. This saves both time and bandwidth.
-- I speak only for myself.
Why stick to just the immediate link to the end user? Bandwidth isn't really cheap anywhere, and no one has enough of it. So instead of just compressing between a local cache and the end browser, why not compress the files at the source server? Then you can transfer them in compressed form, saving bandwidth all along the way. The compression can be done once at the source, rather than repeated for every hit, saving CPU cycles. Nice, huh?
But why do you get any benefit from this compression in the first place? Why should an extra layer of compression be necessary? Well, (X)HTML (and XML) are simply bloated pigs when it comes to space efficiency. All that human-readable text costs a lot of bits, which you can squeeze back out with compression. Of course, you might have started with a standardized binary file format in the first place. Or you might come up with an application-specific "compiler", so you don't have to send the whole source code every time. Or you can just go for the quick and dirty kludge, and throw a general-purpose compressor module into the data stream.
Personally I've found putting my modem on a box with a large amount of disk space and running squid to be extremely useful. In between the agressive caching and blocking banner ads, most of my web browsing doesn't seem very slow at all.
Of course when it's a new site chock full of graphics, or I'm doing binary downloads, I'm painfully aware of my modem's limitations. But for general surfing, sometimes it seems almost as good as the friends' broadband.
RFC2119
.... that the one we use at the place I work (Propel).. also used by earthlink is run on a Squid based system.. yeah open source! Also, the client software is free... I'm not sure where the author got that it costs money from. We were very suprised at work to see that it ACTUALLY DOES work!
I was wondering the same thing myself and actually went to their page to try it out. They required a credit card to download and try it out though, even if they didn't charge you if you cancelled with in 7 days.
Oh well, maybe they will come out with a free trial version.
Jib
Ah, you mean like the RabbIT proxy. Personally I run this on my box on a t1 and use it whenever I am stuck with all but dialup.
Speeds things up so much, it's not even funny. Although it does require that you have a machine on a decent, faster than dialup connection to make it work well.
Can I get an eye poke?
Dog House Forum
(I should check this out by timing various downloads, but I'm too lazy. Somebody else can prove me wrong!)
So why do JPEG files with "more" compression download faster? Because JPEG is a lossy format: when you increase the "compession" you're not encoding data more efficiently, you're throwing data away. Depending on the image, you can do this and still end up with something that looks the same. But push it far enough and you end up with crap.
Where I live, DSL is $30 a month and cable is $40 a month. How can you argue with that?
What's dialup?
The GPLed work by NoMachine looks very promising. Here are some cross-platform screenshots showing what's possible. Apparently a paper is going to be presented at Linux-Kongress
Surely it would help if web pages themselves, when transmitted were more sesion aware, and possibly even support .diff's between previous viewed pages as opposed to resending the entire content again, all be it gzipped or whatever?
www.rc55.com
The downside is they don't help streaming video or audio
That would be on account that streaming video and audio are already compressed about as much as they will go (using present known mathematics).
Text however will still happily compress at around a 10:1 ratio so simply using mod:gzip on apache should result in a similar effect.
The CPU time isn't always cheaper than the bandwidth. Some sites get cheap bandwidth and serve a ludicrous number of database-driven pages that are slightly different from each other - they're designed so that the database servers can handle the load, but gzipping every single page absolutely slaughters the webservers, which are barely doing anything more than relaying requests back to the database servers and are *still* running at high load.
Breaking Into the Industry - A development log about starting a game studio.
The benefit came from three things.
First, we cached DNS lookups. Back in the Win95 days, that wasn't something Windows did on its own. When you have a browser that doesn't start displaying the page until it has got every stupid little graphic on the page, one or two slow DNS lookups really kill performance.
Second, of course, was caching the heck out of anything we could.
Finally, there was smart prefetching. By "smart" I mean trying to figure out from the links the user is clicking what they are likely to click soon, and prefetching that.
Many sites, particularly news sites and search sites, are organized in such a way that we could do a good job at predicting clicks, and the user spent a fair amount of time reading on each page, so we had a reasonable amount of time to prefetch on a modem, so that we could actually make quite a noticable difference in speed to the user.
Later, everyone and his brother came out with a web accelerator, mostly just using caching, which gave the whole category a bad name.
Actually, there are several companies doing "web acceleration" that offer more than just commodity gzip compression. gzip compression doesn't do a whole lot for companies with remote offices over, say, vsat connectivity because latency is the big killer there. I've tried several of these "accelerators" for enterprise web apps with varying results. Companies like Redline and Packeteer do simple things like gzip, while companies like FineGround go beyond that to solve bandwidth and latency issues with a collection of optimizations.
But rather for the ISP.
NetZero, et al, doesn't want you to go to broadband (cable/DSL).
They obviously want you to stay right where you are. So, they roll out this thing, which may or may not actually work, and charge you a little bit for it. Advertised as a cheaper alternative to real consumer level broadband (as it is currently employed). They keep you, AND get a little bit more profit.
If Dialup Joe's overall speed diff is 10%, he will not notice the increase after a day or two.
Just like all the new phone 'features'. No one needs, or even wants, them, but good marketing leads you to think you do.
Yes apache and all 4.0+ browser support the gzip/mod-gzip combination. But the fact is very few websites implement this. Lots of reasons for that (mod-gzip conflicts with many other modules for one) although many more should than do.
A service like this that acts as a compression proxy can dramatically knock down the size of content. We implemented this at my last client and saw 78-93% compression of everything other than images. That includes css, javascript, dynamic web content, etc. I don't know about images, but this alone is very significant for today's clumsily table-laden pages.
Likewise I often find myslef in some crappy hotel where the connection is so noiesy I can barely squeeze a 14.4K connection out of it. I just want to check my web based e-mail not download the encyclopedia britannica
so anything that can make a dialup work painlessly on common web pages is a good thing.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
IE 5 didn't handle gzip terribly well - I ended up disabling it on my web server. I had strange things happening - like images not getting downloaded - though the pages were perfect in Mozilla. Once gzip was off, everything worked properly.
First, the fact that images already have some compression doesn't mean they can't be smaller and still decent.
Second, markup, css, js, etc., are very sizeable given today's non-standards-based pages.
Something else to think about. Compressing the markup alone has a big effect in speed because to view a page the browser must: 1) get the html, 2) parse the html (hopefully concurrently with getting it), and 3) find additional resources like images, etc and only then start requesting those too.
Bottom line is that compression of the text content goes a very long way to speeding up the experience as well as saving bandwidth. Just ask any mod-gzip users.
You......
went.....
to the.....
William.....
Shatner....
school of.....
acting.....
didn't you?
" Seriously, it's a lot easier to just get broadband. I mean, look at it this way - these people are paying in the neighborhood of $19.95 a month (or $22.95 if they're letting AOL rape them) and also around $15 for an extra phone line. So in most cases, you're paying around $35 a month for crap service."
.94), even that goes away. Also don't forget that broadband still is considered a luxury item by most, especially in these hard times of jobs going overseas. And last one can cut that $19.95 down further.
As a former dial-up customer. I think I should point out that quite a few people DON'T have two phone lines. I was a heavy user, and yes I got complaints about people not getting through. But with the latest standard (v
BTW Cable Internet is $35.00 + $10.00 cable TV(1) + $5 modem rental.
(1) Like most cable companies they charge MORE if you don't have cable TV, and some places charge more if you have your own modem.
I hate to conflict with the general Slashdot opinion that this technology is somehow bad, but the truth is this stuff rocks
I've seen Internet Connection's acheive compression rates and acceleration rates breaking 130Kbs (equivalant).
We've talked some about compression rates, but there is more to it than that. This stuff does:
The first two require a proxy server setup, the second two are just plain good ideas that haven't made it into the wild. For example, the smart cacheing could be implemented by Moz, or even by a Firebird extension. The last could be handled by a certain standards body implementing much more aggresive changes in terms of compression instead of features like the ones introduced in the v.92 standard.
Maybe $40/month is "a few dollars" to you, but I think you'll find that a lot of Americans are less affluent.
On the Fly djvu conversion? Makes images smaller without really hurting them that much.... What is it, something like 75% of the size of a comparable quality jpeg? ... or was that pdf? I dunno.
You are all fartheads.
Hi, my name's M@, and I use nested tables.
Krispy Cream is people
Geek:"I'm developing a program to download porn 1 million times faster."
Marge: "Does anyone need that much porn?"
Homer: "Mmm... one million times..."
I work for a wholesaler in the western united states..
...and to the claim that it requires a client? that is not true. (blatent plug http://www.pacwest.com/dialbroadband/) this wholesale solution for ISPs is clientless.
In test trials 2-3x is the average seen. 5x does happen, and so does 9x from time to time.
- Modem on Hold allows you to put your internet connection on hold while you take or make a telephone call. Modem on Hold enables "broadband-like" voice and data services over the same telephone lines, at a much more reasonable dial-up price.
- Quick Connect shortens the length of time it takes your modem to negotiate its connection to your ISP by about half.
- v.44 compression allows you to get greater effective transmission rates than without v.44 even though the electrical connection remains the same. In tests comparing v.42bis - the current compression protocol - and v.44 in normal web-browsing conditions, v.44 out-performed v.42 by up to 60%. This extra compression allows you to achieve greater data throughput even though your connection speed remains the same.
- PCM Upstream allows "56K"-like uploads as well. Using v.90, the maximum upload speed is 31.2Kbps; under v.92 it is possible to
upload at speeds up to 48Kbps. This is important to users who send email, audio, and other applications that depend on transmitting data.
They charge less than $10/month for the "Express" v.92 speed, and $5/month for regular dial-up service. I think it's available only the southeastern U.S. right now. They are expanding though, so check for service in your area at the site.A little warning about their web site: Don't click on a link that leads to services/index.html. That page is totally hosed; it will keep trying to download stuff for a long time and never show you anything. I think it has recursive frames.
If you have a recent version of PHP, you don't even need mod_gzip. Just put the following lines in your .htaccess file:
php_flag zlib.output_compression onDoes everything on the fly. I once had a shell script that would wget a url with the accept encoding gzip header, and then wget it again without and show the percent savings. Was fairly interesting to see what sites were using compression, and what sites that weren't could have saved in bandwidth by using compression.
Unfortuntely, a lot of web accelerators use MS Winsock2 LSP (Layered service protocol), a poorly designed hooking technique. This causes plenty of incompatibilities with lots of existing software, and especially with any other software that also uses the same technique. The company I worked for used LSP in its product, its not on the market anymore.
I think on-the-fly compression will add latency, especially if the data stream isn't continuous like that used by online first-person perspective games. But will the latency be less than that of a hardware (real) modem with compression turned on? Like another poster have said, it's better to go with broadband.
Wow. I've never encountered anyone who has spoken so confidently on a topic without knowing a damn thing about it it. You are so absolutely wrong that the example you gave is the exact oposite of what you think it is. You've demonstrated precisely what not to do when writing good markup.
I don't even know where to begin to correct your cluelessness. Here it goes...
When I talk about writing good markup, I'm speaking a purely structural sense. In otherwords, markup text based on what it is, not what it looks like. Separation of content from presentation is the principle to follow.
For example, this is bad HTML:
That's bad for many reasons.
Now, here's good HTML:
And then a stylesheet:
Now, the user can easily define what stuff should look like based on what it is. A user could supply a stylesheet that increases the size of paragraph text by a percentage. A user could specify their own margins for list items. A user could eliminate colors or adjust contrast to their liking.
On top of that, a machine can read that markup and know precisely what it is. This is a header, that's a paragraph, this is a list, etc. A search engines and screenreaders would know precisely what to do with the text.
Furthermore, the styling data is in one location, so if you have 1 or a 1000 pages, the work is the same to make them look different.
Of course, this is only the tip of the iceberg. If you use XHTML and CSS properly, you get more visual flexibility than otherwise. (This also implies discarding tables for use in layout in favor of layers. Tables are for organizing tabular data, not positioning things visually.) XHTML also gives you forwards c
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there are, at this very moment, thousands if not tens of thousands of web developers that think just like that guy.
people who do web stuff really need to fucking learn xml quick
Can you make Slash compliant with HTML x.x?
No, but YOU can! Slash is fully customizable. You can edit the templates to suit your taste. See the HOWTO documents for themes, plugins, and templates.
I have numerous relatives, older people, that had broadband but went back to dialup over the cost. In my apartment complex, DSL is not feasible due to the age of the phone lines, so we must use the Comcast monopoly- $50/month. Juno is around $10/month- even AOL is $23/month, half the cost of broadband.
Obviously, using broadband makes sense at a certain point of usage. But if you're not using the Internet more than, say, 2 hours a week, the economics just doesn't make sense. So there is value in dialup web accelerators, especially software that's easy for those who are technically challenged.
Web accelerators seem to do *something* to speed up typical pages. A better, though not so easy way, is to have web designers push their pages through something to clean them up. I believe that a great part of the problem are these web design packages that pepper thousands of nbsps throughout a page, dozens of 1x1 gifs, unnecessary tags, comments, etc.. Take a look at Google's source code. Every byte on their page is optimized. Also, designers should be made aware of compression levels. I've seen lots of sites with large images that have been "scaled" by adding WIDTH and HEIGHT tags but still have huge actual resolutions. Many don't know about the negligible tradeoffs for some images that increased compression can offer.
On a 56K,
1 - Open a document
2 - Scroll for interesting links you'll like to read later on.
3 - Open then in a new window, minimize
4 - Read the article
5 - Tada, other pages are loaded, and you don't have to cache 100,000 useless sites.
Doesn't take software to know that pre-loading is good for you. Having everything "pre-fetched" is not a new concept.
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For the most part, gzip IS, in fact, the alpha and omega. gzip is king on byte-oriented data (it doesn't matter what size the words are, it's a nth-order entropy encoder, so they all turn into pseudo-symbols).
.jar files (pkzip)
The types of data that can be specialized are much fewer than you propose.
For example, bzip: better suited for text as text has a lot of localized second order trends. However it is computationally intensive and may not do well on a server appliance over multiple connections.
PNG is better on (many) raster images since it exploits 2-dimensional relationships recursively. But it requires the source image to be uncompressed first. JPEGs might already be compressed, and that would make them larger. But recompressing JPEGs (which is the big step these proxies take) is someone of a hack since we didn't really ask for it, and it may look like shit in the end.
And forget video or audio. There's nothing you can do about it (in realtime anyway...).
If and when SVG and other XML-based content formats become prevelant components of websites, then gzip/bzip on the fly will become very useful in making sites small, fast but content-rich.
PDF and flash are already compressed heavily, so they don't need it. Java programs come in
And mozilla has browse-ahead built in.
So I don't really buy any of this. If I still had dialup, I'd rather them just be upfront, let me control MY upstream cache settings/content, and forget all the fancy software, because most of it is redundant. That part about the cache is the key thing, because that's what you're really paying for, and they should let you control how it's used.
Fuck Beta. Fuck Dice
One step most of these proxies is doing is compressing HTML files. HTML is highly redundant, so compression can save alot of space. However, it's silly for the proxy to do the compressing. Instead web site owners can do the compressing! Transferring pages gzip compressed is part of the standard. No special software is needed by end users. A 3:1 reduction in bytes transferred for your web pages (the HTML itself) is a reasonable minimum. The result is that you use less bandwidth and end users get a faster web site! Every mainstream browser supports this, and those browsers that don't support it will automatically get the uncompressed version. If you're using Apache, you'll want mod_gzip to automatically compress transfers. (You can fake the effect with MultiViews, but it's a hassle to maintain two copies of every HTML file.)
(Yes, I know I don't practice what I preach. I'm working on it.)
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> No, but YOU can! Slash is fully customizable. You can edit the templates to suit your taste. See the HOWTO documents for themes, plugins, and templates.
Correct. I actually did that for a customer once.
I sure wish Miliki and QuikCAT's internet accelerator had got a bit more off the ground so some comparisons could be run. They were working up products slowly over the last several years, and I fully expected their hard work to pay off in the future; alas, someone jumped the gun (i.e., stupid business people who can only see two feet in front of them and don't realize how research pays off) and pulled the rug out from under them, so now I think they've all but closed up shop. They had pretty good streaming audio-video on handhelds two years ago, and their image compression has always been really good. I don't think their webpages are the most convincing, because they really don't have enough comparison numbers as far as I'm concerned, but I have seen some of their products behave pretty much as claimed, which makes them very comparable to the accelerators mentioned here. Alas, all gone now.
Most likely the #1 Unfunny Meta/Moderator on
To all the folks saying "but JPEGs are already compressed" -- they aren't always compressed enough. I've seen many pages with 500k JPEGs plastered all over them because they 'load fast enough' on the designer's machine (i.e. from their hard disk or browser cache). Another related crime is people leaving the image DPI at say 200 (default for some digital cameras) rather setting the DPI to 72 (appropriate for monitors).
Vino, gyno, and techno -Bruce Sterling
http://www.microsoft.com/windows2000/en/server/iis /htm/core/iihttpc.htm
AC
MCSE
People keeps saying that this technology is pretty much moot as more and more people are getting broadband connections. Why should compression and caching technology only be applied to slower connections? Why waste any amount of bandwidth even when you have "tons" of it?
The thing with GZIP and others is they have to send the dictionary together with the data they send. Imagine that both sides of the dial-up have the same static, HUGE dictionary (distributed on CDROM) with commonly used data, like common english words/syllables, common email/http headers etc. You would get a HELL of a lot better compression then your average zipfile.
10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then
I use a modem for web browsing. I've found that wwwoffle is a good proxy server, because it can operate in both online and offline modes - when offline, it serves the most recent version of each page, and if you try to view a non-cached page, it's marked to be downloaded next time you connect. If you want to speed up your browsing some more at the expense of having to hit 'reload' occasionally, you can configure wwwoffle to always use an available cached version even when online.
If you have a shell account on another machine, and that machine has access to a proxy server, then you can tunnel port 3128 or 8080 (common http proxy ports) through ssh. This makes browsing a lot quicker because there is only a single TCP/IP connection going over the modem link - you don't have to connect separately for each page downloaded. Unfortunately I found that while this gave very fast browsing for half an hour or so, eventually it would freeze up and the ssh connection would have to be killed and restarted. Perhaps this has been fixed with newer OpenSSH releases.
RabbIT is a proxy server you can run on the upstream host which compresses text and images (lossily).
The author of rsync mentioned something about an rsync-based web proxy where only differences in pages would be sent, but I don't know if this program was ever released.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
If you and your ISP both use a Windows system, turning on "software compression" (and don't forget to turn off the modem's hardware compression) basically gives you mod_gzip on ALL your incoming AND outgoing data.
A drawback used to be that the server at the provider side was often overloaded, so I set up several "accounts" to switch between hard- and software compression with and without proxy. Now that my ISP is no longer "free", I haven't seen the server become overloaded any longer, so I use software compression and their proxy all the time. HTML and text download at 20kB/s over a 48kbps connection. Off course, there's no gain in already-compressed content like images and audio.
Musicians don't die. They just decompose.
Harvest all the links on a webpage, cache them on disk while you view the page content, if you still don't go anywhere, harvest links on the cached pages, and so on. If you type some URL and go elsewhere, discard everything.
Results for you: You click on a link and you have it immediately - from harddisk cache.
Result for others: A major part of the bandwidth is wasted, everyone's connection gets slower.
Effects: Everyone installs accelerators to have the net working faster. Bandwidth usage jumps 10 or so times, prices rise, connection speed drops far below what was before the accelerators. Nobody gives up the evil accelerators because without them it goes even slower.
It's called "social trap".
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
I would rather open my document in openoffice and save it from there to HTML. There are some proprietary tags called SDxxx in the HTML, which sucks, but apart from this easily fixable defect, you get good styled HTML.
Moritz
From one of the articles:
The idea is to store Web pages on your hard drive upon your first visit to the pages, and then to limit the information you download on subsequent visits to those pages to only the data that changes, making for a faster download.
Makes me think about: http://rproxy.sourceforge.net/.
New things are always on the horizon
Well basically I have a squid proxy listening on 127.0.0.1 on a remote machine with a fast uplink. I run a compress SSH tunnel from the server to my local machine. Tell Galeon to use localhost:3128 which tunnels over the compressed SSH tunnel to the server and bingo. Increased throughput for a little outlay
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
Does it take my html's, compress them and send them to the client to decompress, or should I gzip the html's before?
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I read through the thread and only saw people suggesting why it doesn't work or isn't any better than other forms of compression.
The point to keep in mind is that ultimately this product fills a true need. Yes there are other ways to accomplish the same goal on an individual connection, however, because of the diverse platforms of the net a web surfer will not realize the speed gain.
I installed Propel on my laptop for a few months and it probably doubled my actual speed of page loads without a degregation in quality. There was a lot of noisy hard drive activity and I did not check the processor load, but it really did make surfing over a 56K connection faster. Since the majority of surfers are at this speed and this is a rather cheap option to add, for many it makes sense.
On the note of increasing speed, for a while I was looking for a program to precache pages. In truth, I think that we know that in all likelyhood the next link a user will take is on the page they are on. There is no freeware which simply precaches links while you are looking at a parent page. Maybe someone will develop a Firebird plugin to add this feature!
Josh
http://www.efeingold.com
Here's a fucking hint
http://sourceforge.net/projects/mod-gzip/
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Here's something (which might have been covered?)
.. actually I can't remember but it's made by "extra tools" if I recall - some kind of dns cache or dns proxy or some such it's called - it runs as a dns server and you point the browser to it - it actually did seem to speed things up quite a lot.
I recently had to speed up a shitty cable connection on one of Australia's worst BB providers.
Anyhow, I noticed the link seemed to have dreadful latency but fairly good throughput.
I loaded on a package called
(you will noticed when opening a lot of sites on modems the first 5 seconds it seems to be doing nothing then it finally speeds up)
i guess any small thing can help.
I tried earthlink's compression system out of desperation due to my crappy phone line with 14.4 max connection speed. It really does work. Without acceleration the web was completely useless to me. With the accelerator image quality was way down, but pages loaded very quickly. Fortunately I now have a cable modem so this is no longer an issue.
Hey, I know somebody is reading this, so why not pay attention? Language is important. As language goes, so goes the brain. Sloppy language equals sloppy brain. Got it?
In the title of this article, the subject is "breed". The word "breed" is singular, so the verb must agree and be singular. That would make it "works". "The new breed works," right?
What the hell is the world coming to when supposedly intelligent people can't spell and don't give a damn about it?
This is only available natively in IIS 6 on server 2003, and installing and getting it to work is more effort than clicking a checkbox. Perhaps you worked somewhere that bought a commercial ISAPI filter?
These compression services are only really viable for dialup, because dialup is so slow.
I must respectfully disagree with you on this point. As residential broadband services expand to the capacity of the pipe to the area, both DSL and cable modem services get slower and less responsive. Imagine a caching/compression service (such as the ones described) at the point where the local DSL/cable neighborhood hits the pipe to the Internet. Redundant requests to the same site or download could be served locally, freeing the Internet pipe to serve up more exotic requests. I know there must be technical hurdles (some of them mentioned in earlier comments) that keep such a system from being completely practical today, but there seem to be benefits for both ISP's and end users.
Sometimes I worry that I'll develop Alzheimer's disease, but no one will notice.
Link level compression is great for compressing IP datagrams, because much of the TCP / UDP / IP header information is redundant for a series of packets.
Unfortunately, compressing data on the link level is not quite as effective as compressing the original data in advance.
The reason is simple: most compression algorithms in this field use some kind of dictionary of repeated patterns. Instead of storing all the data for repeated patterns, pointers to dictionary entries are inserted into the data stream. Because PPP packets are relatively small, chances of finding repeated patterns are slim. Of course, you could group several PPP packets together and compress then as a whole, but this would negatively affect latency times.
The best thing to do would be compressing data at its origin (on the web sever serving the files) and use PPP compression for the protocol overhead (TCP / UDP / IP headers).
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Very stable.
You have shattered my reality! No seriously, the examples are too small, or rather, they are not specialized to demonstrate the point of reduced bandwidth usage. To do that I would really have to come up with a block of markup that uses tables for layout and lots of other nasty stuff.
First, let's show a bad example:
Now, with standards compliant markup and CSS:
This is a very contrived example, but remember that the stylesheet should be in a separate file, therefore, it gets downloaded and cached once. Then imagine you had a lot of content spread over hundreds of pages. Consider how much space is saved by defining the visual appearance once rather than N times. Isn't that the very nature of compression?
Don't forget the second example is far easier to maintain and will work better in future browsers (it does not have built-in obsolescence).
But then you've defeated yourself. The following is valid XML:
The following is not:
XHTML is XML. XML is very strict in how its written to preserve integrit
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Timothy has been approaching Michael in the realm of toolish-ness.
Blar.
LZIP solved all of my bandwidth problems. The amount of compression it achieves is incredible!
It also made Slashdot far more interesting to read AND stopped my PC showing p0rn at inconvenient times!!
Very many modules? The only widely used module that conflicts w/ mod_gzip is mod_ssl, and that conflict only occurs with the 1.3 branch of Apache. mod_ssl has to cheat to intercept the generated data at the appropriate time, and so breaks the order of processing mod_gzip depends on. And of course, this conflict occurs only when actually employing mod_ssl, not by simply loading it. Virtually all web pages that aren't encrypting pages with mod_ssl and Apache 1.3 would beneift greatly from mod_gzip.
My Sprint PCS Vision internet access even goes as far as to recompress JPEGs. The result is not only smaller, but much worse quality. For instance, Google's logo comes up with a gray background instead of white. Blah. If the founding fathers didn't originally add it to the web, why add it now? Just kidding, but really.
A programmer is a machine for converting coffee into code.