Saving money on international bandwidth with HTTP proxy caches is somewhat
dubious and I suspect (no hard facts just experience) that in the long run
it wont save you anything.
That all depends on your implementation of course.
There are a number of reasons you may want to run transparent proxy
caches, saving money is only one of them.
There are providers that offer a 'secure browsing' solution, others tend
to believe the story that it increases performance for customers as its
local (this is possibly true if you build it right), or that you can do
interesting things at layer7 as the packets pass through, some have used
them for transcoding in mobile networks...
However many transparent proxy cache installs suffer from high operational
overhead, poor cache performance, high scale out costs and high impact on
failure (many fail closed) and many have obscure failures that mean
interruption to the customer while you work out why the magic black smoke
escaped...and how to put it back in.
I would be more than interested in peoples views on the hardware that is
commonly used in these solutions. I know I have my own views on some of
them, less than happy would be mild in some cases.
Simon the xtra/telecom cache is purely international, so any of your
content that is delivered over domestic routes will not go anywhere near
it.
Paul
Random Thoughts Daily
On 9/10/11 8:39 AM, "Philip D'Ath"
I'd be surprised if anyone is using a transparent cache for local content.
Transparent caching only makes sense if it is going to save you money. Also you would need much bigger caching boxes to handle both national and international traffic, as opposed to just international.
-----Original message----- From: Simon Lyall Sent: 08-10-2011, 23:24 To: nznog Subject: Re: [nznog] Proxy Servers...
On Sat, 8 Oct 2011, Ragnor wrote:
It does sounds like Vodafone are running a caching transparent http/web proxy now. These are all the rage again now with Telecom, Telstraclear, Slingshot and others running them.
I believe there are still a number of ISP's not running one: Snap, Xnet, Orcon, Maxnet ICONZ, Actrix and probably more.
Do these ISP level cache's actually work? I have long lived images with headers to indicate their age and long expire time and I get a fresh copy every time I request it from my XTRA DSL account.
We certainly notice browser caches and the Corporate proxies (lots of IE6 users, proxy doesn't support http gzip compression, often bluecoat) especially when they break (usually by caching a corrupt element or no updating properly) but I don't get the impression ISP proxies are caching even my "highly cacheable" stuff.
Is it because we are delivering bytes out of NZ? I can switch to delivering out of the US if it'll hit the "Free ISP CDN" :)
-- Simon Lyall | Very Busy | Web: http://www.darkmere.gen.nz/ "To stay awake all night adds a day to your life" - Stilgar | eMT.
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