Hi Adam,
I liked your article:
100Mbp/sec Broadband to your home PC available today!
http://adamcurry.editthispage.com/broadband/
I have had a system like this at home for several years now: all my
email is delivered directly to a local mailbox via an SMTP server
on my home system, so there's zero latency when I go to read it.
Since my preferred desktop system is Linux, I don't even need an
extra box for the Last Yard -- a single inexpensive PC runs everything
I need: desktop apps, SMTP gateway, HTTP cache/proxy/archive, firewall,
network hub, Web publishing environment, MP3 jukebox, etc.
What I would like to do that I haven't done yet is write something
that prefetches any web pages I am likely to visit into my local
HTTP cache, including:
- a certain hardcoded list of URLs I am known to visit often,
(probably taken from my start page [1] and/or browser history)
- any URLs that are mentioned in incoming email as it arrives, and
- the first few links from each of these pages
Then when I actually go to visit these pages later, they're served
instantly from my local cache.
This prefetching idea came up years ago (in late 1995) on the
www-talk list [2], and I don't know why it has yet to be deployed
in mainstream software.
Wow! Actually, it came up as early as July 1993! [3]
Surfing around a bit more, I found a site that mentions a number of
products that do intelligent prefetching, in both browser caches [4]
and proxy caches. [5]
Unfortunately caching in general doesn't work as well as it could
with many current sites on the Web, since they are (often needlessly)
dynamically generated in a way that isn't cache friendly.
But that problem can probably be overcome with smarter caches, and
by educating people about how to build more cacheable sites, e.g.:
http://www.vancouver-webpages.com/CacheNow/
http://www.mnot.net/cacheability/
references:
[1]
http://www.w3.org/People/Gerald/start
[2] two ideas...
Manu S. Kumar (
[email protected])
Wed, Nov 29 1995
mid:
[email protected]
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-talk/1995NovDec/0168.html
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-talk/1995NovDec/thread.html#168
[3] WWW performance
Tony Sanders (
[email protected])
Fri, 02 Jul 1993 13:47:53 -0500
mid:
[email protected]
http://www.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-talk.1993q3/0038.html
[4] Improving Browser Caches
http://www.web-caching.com/personal-caches.html
[5] Proxy Caches
http://www.web-caching.com/proxy-caches.html
--
Gerald Oskoboiny <
[email protected]>
http://impressive.net/people/gerald/