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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.
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!
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.
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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!!!!
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.....