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.

Comments

I still don't understand

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

But really, why?

[agent dero]

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.

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 /. or pr0n that much fast, it works, tell me if I am wrong, but I am seeing a small market for this much hype

because IIS's is garbage

[DrSkwid]

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.

Re:because IIS's is garbage

[Jerf]

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.....

Actually, try downloading your page, copying it, gzipping the original, cleaning up the copy to your specs, gzipping that, and comparing the two file sizes. While you may kill a lot of text in the uncompressed version, I would strongly suspect you'll find that the gzip'ped version saved much less then you think.

Those "spacer gifs" that take up perhaps 100bytes apiece in the original file (perhaps a bit generous) will compress away down to very little (if there are several near each other, they may literally compress down to a handful of bits after the first one), whereas the story text compresses much less well.

If you're compressing things, XML, CSS, and a lot of other things that look awfully redundent in plain-text are suddenly downright bandwidth-efficient technologies, being dwarfed in their compressed representations by the plain-text payloads. This is one of the reasons that fundamentally XML is so cool; you get human readability, but for the very small effort of invoking gzip or similar compresion technology, you also get something that is very nearly as bandwidth-efficient as possible, because compression technologies dynamically determine the best binary encodings for such messages (including their plain-text payloads), whereas supposed "efficient" binary protocols may actually waste a lot of space. (Compressing the both of them may equalize them, but the binary file, perversely, will still be "harder" to compress, even with nearly the same information in both files.)

How compression behaves is not necessarily intuitive.