Jonathan Schmidt wrote:
Also, they add significant latency to ordinary traffic (the requested URLs have to be obtained in their entirety first then relayed) and you can't have more than a thousand up to several thousand simultaneous users...maybe not a problem... you can get around that with load balancing in the NOCs with multiple proxy servers.
True, but that doesn't mean they're always bad for everyone. I used to run a transparent Web cache/proxy for our dialup users, but it was more for our benefit than theirs. (It was cheaper than adding more T1s at the time.)
If you have plenty of backhaul capacity, and plenty of upstream capacity, nobody will get much benefit from Web caching. If one or both of those is a bit tight, the parts to build one are usually cheaper than a big expansion, and can get you through a tight spot (hopefully just as a temporary measure until you can do things the "right" way, but...)
I did have one set up for our wireless network a couple years back, but it ended up being more trouble than it was worth, as I spent a lot of time programming in exceptions. (Example: one of our bigger customers at the time was a car dealership, and Web proxying broke a lot of their stuff talking back to Detroit.) Expect a lot of weird phone calls the first week or so after you turn one on.
David Smith MVN.net -- WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/
