Oh, how I love my many legged Squid... (was RE: Napster)

[chewie@wookimus.net]

You know.  One topic has yet to come up in this discussion about bandwidth.
Caching.  Do you know how much web caching SAVES on network bandwidth?  We are
vastly under par with the amount of disk space we use to cache web pages, ftp
downloads, and http downloads at my place of employment.  Regardless, when you
have even 20 employees all going to the same sites, it starts to add up.  

Take for example the Debian upgrades I performed today.  By having the first
upgrade requests go through the proxy server, all subsequent requests can
download at speeds only limited by the disk speed of the caching server and the
ethernet between the server and the client.   My first download set of deb
packages from http://http.us.debian.org may reach speeds between 30 kB/sec to
150 kB/sec, depending on our T1 utilization and Internet traffic at the other
end.  All subsequent requests for the same information topped out at about 275
kB/s and averaged about 200 kB/s on the local network.

If you use a networked family of caching servers, you bypass much of the
problem with bandwidth concerns.  By caching and localizing this information,
you effectively create a fetch-once view-multiple-times scenario.  IIRC,
napster DOES allow you to use a proxying server.  If it's an HTTP protocol,
then it's a no brainer.  Frankly, I'm surprised that I haven't heard anything
about the University of MN incorporating a cache farm for their networks.  Put
a couple terrabytes of harddrive cache for the students to use, regardless of
the content, and you'll see a large drop in the Internet bandwidth consumption.
Localize these servers at strategic nodes on the U's backbone, and you'll see a
drop in backbone traffic.

Really, I'm surprised that Squid boxes aren't littering the U's network.

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Chad Walstrom                         mailto:chewie@wookimus.net 
a.k.a ^chewie, gunnarr               http://wookimus.net/~chewie

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