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North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical RE: decreased caching efficiency?
[ On Friday, October 20, 2000 at 11:59:58 (-0700), Travis Grant wrote: ] > Subject: RE: decreased caching efficiency? > > Where does caching make sense? Static assets that can be stored on the edge > closest to customers ie images, audio, video. These needs are served by your > Akamais, IBeams, and Evokes. Certainly content distribution makes sense for really busy sites that have significant quantities of such content to distribute, but that's only the sending half of the picture. ISPs will continue to deploy transparent cache servers whenever they can justify the savings (be it in raw bandwidth costs alone, or in combination with softer savings in helping manage user expectations, etc.) When 10% efficiency at peak loads is 10% less bandwidth you buy and your bandwidth costs are high enough that 10% means a free mid-range server every month, you can afford to do a *lot* of caching. 10% of $2k/month isn't always a worthwhile savings given the potential costs of achieving it, but 10% of $25k/month makes the CFO take notice! Turn that into more like $80,000/month (as would be the case for an ISP on the far side of the globe that's trying to justify a fast low-latency terrestrial connection) and you'll really be seeing the full picture! > One other place where it makes sense to cache, > in your Corporate environement. Yup, though there the cache is just a free side-effect of running a proxy server that you've got to run in the first place. If you use Squid or some equivalent instead of just a raw NAT or other non-caching proxy server then all you need is a bit more disk and a bit more memory and you're instantly seeing at least some savings. Note that a transparent cache running in a corporate proxy server can usually get much higher savings than any such cache in an average ISP environment can get too (I've personally seen 50% on enough occasions to prove that it's actually reducing peak bandwidth needs by at lest 30%!). Not only that but remember that the corporate gateway cache can often be peered with the ISPs cache, further improving things noticably.... All this really means, BTW, is that cache-ignorant webmasters will be forced to learn or loose, and the more they learn the more we all save! So, yes, there might be a lot of newbie webmasters out there creating uncachable content these days, but they will be forced to learn that they're cutting off their noses to spite their own faces! > And by the way saving bandwidth is not justified for the majority of the > market. 80% of deployed sites are sucking less than 2Mbps in monthly fees. > Most caching implementations will cost way more than the bandwidth costs > they avoid. Not if you're a hosting provider and you aggregate those savings over many customers! :-) A pair of Squid machines running as accelerators in front of a farm of virtual hosting servers will work wonders at reducing the load on those back-end servers. You still charge your customers based on actual traffic out your pipe (from the squid logs), but now you can squeeze more small sites onto fewer bigger and more efficient (cheaper to run) servers. Furthermore since the savings granted by transparent caches at the last-hop provider (or corporate gateway) are literally "free" for the hosting provider, they're absolutely a major benefit! -- Greg A. Woods +1 416 218-0098 VE3TCP <[email protected]> <robohack!woods> Planix, Inc. <[email protected]>; Secrets of the Weird <[email protected]>
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