Slashdot Mirror
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.
"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.
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!
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.
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!
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?
Nah, this is different altogether. Gzip is not the alpha and omega of compression.
Different algorithms lend themselves better to different applications, so it seems to me a good accelerator would use a mix of algorithms based on MIME type.
Ie; is the source data formatted in 24 byte words? 16 bit words? 8 bit words? If you have 8 bit data you don't want to look at 16 bit chunks, because then the string "abacadaeafag" doesnt compress for you. Dictionary sizes and blah blah blah... Even format conversion - turn all those BMPs that dingbats put on their pages into PNGs or lossless jpegs..
And as for caching, it seems to me like more of a prefetch than a squid-type cache.. Ie, you request page, proxy at IP gets page, compresses it on the fly, then sends it. Caching it locally is more of an advantage WRT latency, not throughput.
There's a lot of common sense tricks you could use. And according to these articles, they work.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Actually, how it was described to me, is that the requested page is retrieved by the ISP's server, cached and compressed, then sent along to the client. Which, with the compression they are able to get, is much faster for the dial-up user. At least that is how is supposed to work with Slipstream's product (what NetZero uses).
In many cases CPU power on the internet is free, bandwidth is expensive and worth spending free CPU cycles dealing with... Oh - how do YOU know that you are getting a degraded image anyway ? the average idiot going through an ISP that would do this only sees the internet this way.
I have mod points and I am not afraid to use them
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.
Of course, I should also add that both numbers would be a lot lower if the Slashcode theme remotely resembled web standards instead of horrendous amounts of nested tables and "spacer" graphics, but that's getting off-topic.....