The tests are to see where google has configured via DNS to send a clients traffic to a google cache appliance in NZ or to the main google data centres. Its not about web/http caching.
If the ISP has a web cache thats great for most http traffic to most sites. Small problem for a web/http cache is a growing number of sites mark there traffic not be cached. Trademe , Youtube and Geekzone all do this for there own personal reasons but it does make the ISP's expensive web/http cache a bit irrelevant.
If the ISP has a web cache thats great for most http traffic to most sites. Small problem for a web/http cache is a growing number of sites mark there traffic not be cached. Trademe , Youtube and Geekzone all do this for there own personal reasons but it does make the ISP's expensive web/http cache a bit irrelevant.
Bluecoat and Ovi cache appliances are able to get around this by ignoring the no-cache marking and caching it anyway. The appliance is specially configured and updated so that it is still able to deliver the website, and know what parts to deliver from the cache.
Just had another thought The op said he gets 320kbps
Can he tell us if he means 320k bits per second or Bytes per second? I think youtube requires 360 kbps or 45 kBps to work correctly on holder non-hd videos. And because he said with a little bit of buffering and different speeds with different modems, i am wondering if his line conditions are even good enough to find any benefit from using a cache.
The slingshot caching system typically dishes content out at about 2 to 4mbits but if the line is only 300 kbits or something slow like that, then its not going to matter - it will still be slow.
Can the op confirm what the line speeds are from the router's adsl status page?
It is correct that you can configure these devices to ignore the Pragma, Cache-Control and Meta tags in sites, this isnt restricted to these appliances though, its possible with squid and Apache Traffic Server as well as others i would hazard to guess.
However there is a question that should be asked before that is done. By ignoring these control mechanisms are you ignoring the rights of the copy right holder? It can be argued that the copy right holder has give you rights to view but not store their property and ignoring this and caching it anyway may well be a breach of copy right.
So ignoring the controls "may" make a site faster for your customers but is likely to get a number of people irate.
littleboy: I would, I'd switch to the unmetered, but ugh, too hard =P
I moved to Big Time after hating on Telecom for a long time and it's wonderful, I usually do 20GB-50GB/month but last month did 250GB :) You Tube is rocket fast (HD comes down 2-3 times faster than I can watch it) and switching was easy, the nice old lady on the phone sorted it all out for me, and I had naked DSL and was more complex but they just dealt with it :)
We have one client on Vodafone and downloading Microsoft or Apple software, or anything in Alkami is slow 80KB to 200KB and hangs at times you have to pause and resume the down for it to work, I've been meaning to log a fault to be fair.
I get line speed on Big Time to the Alkami caches (windows updates etc) so we put in a Big Time connection at work just for software updates :)
Tyler - Parnell Geek - iPhone 3G - Lenovo X301 - Kaseya - Great Western Steak House, these are some of my favourite things.
Are you subscribed to our RSS feed? You can download the latest headlines and summaries from our stories directly
to your computer or smartphone by using a feed reader.
Trusted
