David Kellam

Update: Google are doing something similar!

Well, I’m back on dialup!

No, really, there’s nothing wrong with my adsl. In fact it’s recently been upgraded to 1500/256 at no financial cost, merely a reduction in download quota from 12GB+12GB to 5GB+5GB. I’ve purchased a dialup account for Waterfront IT’s use, and I’ve been playing around with it.

The Web Accelerator software looks seriously cool…

The accelerator functions through a combination of client-side software and server-side additions at iiNet. You install the client software, which acts as a local caching server (you set your proxy to localhost:8080), and as a conduit for changing the server-side settings. It also provides handy performance measurement feedback.

iiNet monitors all port 80 (http), 25 (smtp), 110 (pop3) and 143 (imap) traffic coming to/from your computer, and ‘accelerates’ it appropriately. It seems to have two main methods of doing this: compression and blocking (popups, banner ads, etc.). I only played with it for about 5 minutes, but already noticed a huge boost to web surfing even new pages (unlike installing your own squid server, where you would only see the benefit on subsequent revisits). Have a look at some of these images:
source file: from www.drkellam.com/Photos

Maximum Image Compression

Very High Image Compression

High Image Compression

After about 10 minutes of using it:

In IE (unfortunatey not in Firefox), you can also right-click and download the full quality image on a case by case basis. In my case, I just changed the settings and using the Mozilla Web Developer extension, easily cleared the cache between reloads (get this extension - very useful).

I have not tested the pop3 or imap features yet (although I might). I thought the unique combination of ISP and PC-level acceleration services was a particularly good idea. I’m sure we’ll find it very useful for live web development - the automatic image-quality reduction feature will save a truckload of time without requiring any site-specific coding. Good stuff iiNet

DRK

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 1st, 2005 at 12:05 pm and is filed under Business, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.