New Breed Of Web Accelerators Actually Work 323
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.
You mean... (Score:3, Insightful)
Awwww boo hoo (Score:2, Insightful)
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
Does anybody really care? (Score:0, Insightful)
that's what i thought...
For a few dollars more . . . (Score:2, Insightful)
Yeah, right! (Score:5, Insightful)
And I'll just bet that none of that software includes any popups, spyware or intrusive monitoring!
Non-Free software? (Score:3, Insightful)
tradeoff (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
They aren't really that great. (Score:5, Insightful)
My former company was checking out NetAccelerator [netaccelerator.net] 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 [zeldman.com].
Re:Awwww boo hoo (Score:2, Insightful)
Another class of people who can't get broadband (Score:3, Insightful)
You admit that a $200,000 setup fee [pineight.com] 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.
Re:Awwww boo hoo (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Does anybody really care? (Score:1, Insightful)
Over 50% on the net are not using nor even have available to them broadband access.
Just because your tiny speck of the world has it doesn't mean the rest does.
Re:Faster porn? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Just remember (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Tests by PC World, PC Magazine and CNET show ... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:because IIS's is garbage (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:For a few dollars more . . . (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Mod this down overrated. (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Why is this limited to dial-up? (Score:3, Insightful)