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Author Topic: Web proxy that actually speeds things up?  (Read 3874 times)

Weaver

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Web proxy that actually speeds things up?
« on: August 30, 2015, 02:04:59 AM »

My question: is there such a thing as a web proxy cache on the Internet that actually speeds up your web browsing significantly? I mean a service, not a piece of software I can install on one of my own machines.

I presume that these boxes often just make things slower either because they don't really do much to enhance things or because they're overloaded by many users. That's no good: I would want one that significantly speed things up by using aggressive caching, overriding no-cache instructions,  doing DNS lookups fast, and prefetching related components. Stripping ads would be nice.

My dream wish-list, probably unachievable. :-)
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AArdvark

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Re: Web proxy that actually speeds things up?
« Reply #1 on: August 30, 2015, 02:42:03 AM »

Sorry never seen a free publicly accessible caching proxy.

Lots of Proxy list out there but they look very dodgy.

Wouldn't using a proxy be a security risk as you are allowing some anonymous server to sit between your network and the Internet at large.
I would have major trust issues with the owner of the Proxy Server. :)

Am I missing something ?
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Weaver

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Re: Web proxy that actually speeds things up?
« Reply #2 on: August 30, 2015, 04:12:06 AM »

@Aardvark - you are absolutely right about security. It would have to be a paid-for service by someone with a reputation with a reputation.

I seem to remember something of this ilk for dial-up users which was advertised as offering heavy compression of text and vicious lossy (ulp) compression of pictures.

Cloudflare offers a service which is very impressive but in the wrong direction, their services are provided to the website operators and it caches and accelerates their content. I would need something in the reverse direction.

Just dreaming. So many websites are hopelessly slow, it's nothing to do with your downlink and with bandwidth. Stripping stripping ads at the server would be fantastic. On the iPad I sometimes use a web browser called Ad-Block or something similar which works really well. But there are so many other acceleration opportunities such as converting everything to SPDY which I forgot to mention earlier.
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AArdvark

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Re: Web proxy that actually speeds things up?
« Reply #3 on: August 30, 2015, 04:31:09 AM »

Don't some VPN providers do the same re: stripping all the cruft out if you configure it appropriately

Again it would be a paid service.
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Weaver

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Re: Web proxy that actually speeds things up?
« Reply #4 on: August 30, 2015, 05:14:14 AM »

@aardvark - VPN services not something I have any experience of. :-)

An interesting idea.

I remember that Demon ran a (presumably not open) web proxy cache, which was supposed to speed you up I presume, because it was close to their users. In would presume perhaps unfairly that it was possibly really slow because it was a single point of congestion or cpu load. It would all depend on how many servers were behind some IP address or domain name. This was in the days of dial-up. I don't remember it offering any published fancy acceleration services. Demon did do PPP compression (very effectively) so there was no compression opportunity between server and client.
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Weaver

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Re: Web proxy that actually speeds things up?
« Reply #5 on: August 30, 2015, 05:17:16 AM »

I suppose I could run my own server hosted at Andrews and Arnold, if I could find something suitable in the way of a tin box plus software that was very intelligent.
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AArdvark

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Re: Web proxy that actually speeds things up?
« Reply #6 on: August 30, 2015, 06:15:39 AM »

What you say is doable but would not be too cost effective.

Having your own box at a co-location centre with a 'fat pipe', or 'pipes', to the internet would be perfectly possible. [Ignoring costs]
You could run your own caching Proxy which you could configure to do whatever stripping of 'cruft' from the traffic you wanted.
Over time the cache would fill and become more effective.
You could also define your own compression methodology, which would be a bit of custom programming for you to do.
(Unless the caching Proxy s/w was particularly sophisticated. Have no recent experience of what is available now.)
You would push as much of the processing as possible to the colo end of the chain.

All the above could be done via commercial piece(s) of 'expensive tin'.
Effectively a Private CDN (Content Delivery Network) with compression on the traffic stream. Plus a load of functionality you will probably not use :)
(Lots of companies provide kit to do all that as specific box or boxes you hang off the back of your WAN and/or in the cloud. Terminology varies but effectively the same thing.)

Question: With all this what would you get in terms of speed-up of browsing etc ?
Question: What is the limit on what you can force down your current connection(s), no matter how much you pre-filter content & compress. ?

Calculate the cost of generating the improved throughput (£/MB/s) vs the cost of more lines multiplexed together (£/MB/s).

Your point of weakness is the colo as in the box which needs some sort of redundancy/failover and the 'Fat Pipes' which needs fallback/failover as well. Plus Administration and Servicing.

Nice Technical Challenge but Budget is a good question and value for money at the end of the day. :)
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Weaver

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Re: Web proxy that actually speeds things up?
« Reply #7 on: August 30, 2015, 07:37:12 AM »

It would be very interesting to know how much one could improve things. The use of SPDY and forced cacheability would be the big contributors. Forcing websites to be cacheable, have proper etags and drop the no-cache nonsense would improve responsiveness massively and make a big difference when navigating round a website, as the back button would work instantaneously if cacheability was forced. It would reduce the amount of traffic between the browser and cache as well. Very cheap hosting can be found but ideally it would be good if the cache were very close. A&A's hosting is not cheap, unless it's a Firebrick you are hosting, then it's not tooo bad.

Somebody ought to be doing this, a really big performance and usability improvement would possibly make people drool and lure people in.

« Last Edit: August 30, 2015, 07:46:33 AM by Weaver »
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AArdvark

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Re: Web proxy that actually speeds things up?
« Reply #8 on: August 30, 2015, 01:52:42 PM »

... drop the no-cache nonsense ...

That is a quite a big ask.
Many sites feel they need to protect their content from being easily 'swiped' by using 'no-cache' or they feel there is a risk of people getting out of date information from mis-performing caches.
If you were a big corporation would you be happy to have you content sitting in caches around the world.
Wouldn't that make the caches a good target to try to steal content ?
Someone is bound to setup a 'Dodgy cache', in some country with lax policing of the internet connectivity (or just corruptible) , and steal everything they can get ! :(
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Weaver

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Re: Web proxy that actually speeds things up?
« Reply #9 on: August 30, 2015, 01:56:53 PM »

Well, once they publish their content, it's gone, out of their control. A curl or wget or whatever and it's owned by someone else. So with enormous love respect, cuddles  ::) and so on, I simply don't get the point. If you don't want other people to take it don't publish it.  ;D ;D ;D
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Weaver

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Re: Web proxy that actually speeds things up?
« Reply #10 on: August 30, 2015, 02:03:40 PM »

And as for the out-of-date information thing, that's just down to how web browsers choose to work, they can hold on to the info as long as they like. Internet Explorer has all kinds of strange heuristics and several options to control the behaviour. Opera can be very aggressive in this regard, iirc. Also someone could lose the Internet connection and so then the client's information would be as old as you like by the time it managed to reconnect. A bit of an artificial scenario I know, but I'm sure you get the idea servers can't control things, that's just an illusion.
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AArdvark

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Re: Web proxy that actually speeds things up?
« Reply #11 on: August 30, 2015, 02:47:27 PM »

Quote
Well, once they publish their content, it's gone, out of their control. A curl or wget or whatever and it's owned by someone else.
Yes, I know (use curl and wget) but 'No-cache' must be seen as having some function. (With the assumption that the Browser follows the rules  ::) )
People still try ..... see an example http://stackoverflow.com/questions/49547/making-sure-a-web-page-is-not-cached-across-all-browsers
Even better .... https://securityevaluators.com/knowledge/case_studies/caching/
You can always work round things if you write code to ignore the 'rules'
i.e. Web Scraping software that copies whole Websites.

The average user just uses the Browser how it comes 'out of the Box', so it will take note of caching requests etc.

Quote
servers can't control things, that's just an illusion.
Doesn't stop anyone from trying ;) See above [Repeat until bored]
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Weaver

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Re: Web proxy that actually speeds things up?
« Reply #12 on: August 30, 2015, 03:02:30 PM »

From what I've seen it seems that some web designers simply copy these runes from somewhere else without any understanding of what they are for as I've seen no-cache type directives in use on completely static websites. A lot of web people are ridiculously lazy and ignorant, just look at the number of webpages that don't validate successfully. I don't think there's a reason for it on the whole.
« Last Edit: August 30, 2015, 03:12:42 PM by Weaver »
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AArdvark

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Re: Web proxy that actually speeds things up?
« Reply #13 on: August 30, 2015, 03:10:31 PM »

Worked with lots of Developers ........ Not making any comment + or -)  ::) :-X
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