🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <57p80g$qiu@news.ibm.net.il> ifaa1@ibm.net.il (Yossi Cohen) writes:
   ISPs in Europe or Asia pay, as far as I know, about $250K/Year for
   a T1 line to the U.S. (for the line only, not for the internet
   connection).

   On the other hand, traffic could have been reduced by a significant
   factor by using a large cache in the proxy http and ftp server. I
   know that the academic network in the UK has a cache of 6 machines
   with 16GB each and they reach 60% hit rate.

   It is my guess that by using a huge cache, say 1TB (1000GB), it is
   possible to get 90% hit rate, i.e. to save 90% of the international
   lines cost. The cost of 1TB may be about $200k, so it seems a very
   good investment.

   Where am I wrong ?   

I expect that if they ran a smarter protocol across the water, it
would gain them alot right there.  HTTP is _not_ a very smart protocol
for WAN access.  One page might initiate ten seperate TCP connections,
each of which requires seperate setup/teardown overhead, and the
sliding window will always start out small, so large objects will
require many round trips.

Instead, it would make sense to run HTTP to the local proxy, Hyper-G
or other single-connection protocol from the local proxy across the
water, and then convert back to HTTP on this side.  Basically, you'd
multiplex the individual requests into a single large pipe which stays
connected all the time.  That right there would probably save a goodly
chunk of bandwidth and decrease the wall clock time required to
download data, all without any cache-update concerns.

If you did run a cache, I'd want something like Harvest, which I think
can arrange to keep things in sync.  You'd want the US end of the
proxy to keep track what's in the European side of the proxy, and then
send notices to invalidate pages as it sees them change.

Sigh.  It's pretty amazing that the network works as it is.  Who says
that Anarchy _can't_ work :-).

Later,
--
scott hess <shess@one.net>     (606) 578-0412      http://w3.one.net/~shess/
<I plan to become so famous that people buy tapes of me reading source code>