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"Evolved" Caches Could Speed the Net
SpaceDilbert writes "According to New Scientist, evolutionary algorithms could make many network caches twice as efficient. This article describes a study carried out by a US researcher and two German academics, who "evolved" algorithms to determine what data should be held at a cache and for how long."
It would be interesting to see exactly which algorithms they are talking about here. I wouldn't be surprised if they drew some ideas from garbage collection algorithms also.
I"ve always wondered if something along the lines of cache complimented with a Bittorrent type of scheme couldn't help speed up the internet. that way bits would be mirrored all over, and a server could pull them in faster since more servers did less work each.
just something I'm thinking about today, well, that and the Kerry/Edwards pairing.
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From the article:
He[Pablo Funes] suggests networks might in the future be designed to work out who deserves the most help for themselves. "Sophisticated network behaviours might implement rules for reciprocity and trust," he says. "And conversely, for not cooperating with other others who try to abuse our resources."
The future of network security? Imagine the next computer virus outbreak: Every network in the world could recognize the virus type activity and allocate them lesser or zero resources, maybe sending them a "Virus detected, please run antivirus software or contact your IT Department" notice, and detecting outside attacks from viruses and automatically flagging them as unsafe, and not give much(or any) attention to traffic from or to that site
Actually, I do genetic algorithm / genetic programming research at the university of michigan. It's unlikely that these guys are using genetic algorithms to develop a new algorithm, but are rather using an existing algorithm and *tuning* the associated parameters using a GA. Given a list of parameters, GA's work by finding the best combination of parameters. As a result, the settings could be constantly tweaked (say on a daily/hourly basis) and different servers could still have different regional settings. My only problem with the concept is that it still depends on the tuning of pre-existing algorithms... but still - the results they share (2x improvement) is encouraging.
"Priming the cache" and "doing a breadth-first fetch on a page" are both things that create *more* network traffic on the off-chance that it might save some number of microseconds for the user.
More traffic isn't necessarily bad. While what you say is true, you fail to note that user-initiated traffic is done in bursts. Just like your CPU is idle >95% of the time, so is your network connection. So all users benefit, both in real and perceived performance, when there is a steady 100% utilization.
So everyone just grabs what they can get and everyone is worse off.
Again true, but naive. What would be better is if there were a mechanism to prioritize the pre-fetch cache. Every page has one link that is pretty much the most likely next page. Then a secondary link, and so on. Ideally, a site owner should be able to put that priority list somewhere in the page such that a user agent can start getting it after the current page has loaded and is being read. Otherwise, maybe the user agent can favor new content (i.e., compare this load of Slashdot with the one done five minutes ago and grab the links in the diff). That's a far cry from a mad grab, and would probably benefit all parties involved.