Re: Bandwidth

On 25 Nov 1997, Daniel S. Riley wrote:

> James Green <jmkgre@essex.ac.uk> writes:
> 
> But what you are proposing is a cache--the routers (or whatever) have
> to store the pages they are going to serve, and that makes them
> caches.  If we forget caches, we have to forget your proposal too.
> 
> See <URL:http://ircache.nlanr.net/> for information on the work on
> national and international cache hierarchies.
> 
> See <URL:http://www.cisco.com/warp/public/751/cache/index.shtml> for
> what Cisco has been doing.

I know this is probably dead ... just going through some unread
email here ...

Re. Cisco, as I recall they have been working on a transparent
proxy cache - your average user doesn't realize he's using one since port
80 is intercepted. I don't think it hooks up with Squid-style ICP, though
there is some other point-to-point sharing mechanism I think.

There's the possibility I think of big organisations running
a geographically diverse web farm, so that the DNS/routers 
would find the closest alias, or having a homepage which does
a redirect to the closest mirror (at least, it's relatively simple to
redirect non-.com,.edu etc. domains such as .uk, .it etc.)

http://vancouver-webpages.com/CacheNow/ - trying to encourage cache; there
seems to be much more interest in places where the trans-ocean bandwidth
is scarce or expensive - Japan, Australia, etc. - and the academic 
organisations are more supportive than commercial ISPs.

I'm a bit out-of-touch with active HTML etc., though I believe many such
applications are cache-unfriendly.
I'd like to see multicast more widely deployed and used more instead of
real-time video/audio streams; stored realaudio etc. files are 
I think cacheable and better than .wav,.avi etc. anyhow - one can
quit before the end

Andrew Daviel
Vancouver Webpages & TRIUMF

Received on Monday, 5 January 1998 15:08:00 UTC