Re: accelerated download proposal

----- Original Message -----
From: "Joseph Nicholas Yarbrough" <nyarbrough@lurhq.com>
To: "Henrik Nordstrom" <hno@hem.passagen.se>
Cc: <squid-dev@squid-cache.org>
Sent: Friday, April 13, 2001 8:37 PM
Subject: Re: accelerated download proposal

> On Friday 13 April 2001 06:03, Henrik Nordstrom wrote:
> > Download accelerators is mainly about being greedy, trying to get
more
> > bandwidth at the expense of other users performance.
>
> Greedy perhaps... but it should not ruin other's performance.
Especially in
> telco return cable modems.

a) You are making assumptions about the telco's infrastructure. If your
assumptions are incorrect, you will affect other users.
b) Some web sites have a policy that multiple connectors will get their
ISP's netblock banned from access.
c) IMO your telco should either b/w each connection, but your IP.

> > There are reasons
> > to why some ISP's puts per connection rate limitations, it is not
only
> > to fuck you.
>
> True enough, but many cable modem providers with telco return
periodically
> disconnect the user despite active use. With rate limiting, this can
become
> an issue when downloading large files. (such as ISO images) I get
> disconnected every 4 hours making it impossible to download a file
over ~550
> megs. (Note: I don't use warez. I download linux ISOs) Plus the ISP
> advertises 50x faster than 56k. It is... with Download Accelerator.
Otherwise
> you get 5x. And do I care about thier network (except for it being
up)? no.

Use single connections and resume the download. wget is your friend.

> There are lots of reasons why ISPs put limits in place, and lots of
reasons
> why we should circumvent those because they are too restrictive.
>
> > "download acceleration" in this sense will not get implemented in
Squid
> > by many reasons, both technical and political.
> >
>
> A *truely* technical reason is understandable, however political
reasons are
> not. Why does squid has a URL redirection system? To circumvent ads
put on
> websites to pay for the "free" content. I don't care about technical
> religion, just technology.

Some technical reasons:
1) multiple connections have higher overhead than single connections,
thus lower cpu & ram efficiency on the server and any intermediate state
tracking devices. Also somewhat lower network efficiency
2) many proxies do not cache partial downloads, only full object
requests, thus you affect hit rate and increase ISP overheads. This will
increase network costs eventually.

BTW: redirectors aren't their for ad circumvention. There are many other
uses for redirectors, including advanced user management and
acceleration tuning.

> > HTTP is striving at becoming a well behaved Internet protocol,
download
> > acceleration is striving at becoming the worst behaved Internet
> > application, abusing protocols for apparent single user gains.
> >
> > If all users were to use "download accelerations" then the effect is
> > quickly nullified and a part of the internet collapses in
retransmission
> > storms.
> >
>
> In the most extreme case, yes. In reality, no. I download a large file
to use
> it. When you get done downloading, I do something with it. (burn a CD,
> install linux... etc...) I don't think there are people who
continually
> download for the sake of downloading. Also, lets face it. Most
internet users
> are not capable of installing windows software.
>
> It seems this may be unwanted in squid. That is fine. I just didn't
want to
> write a proxy unless I needed to.

You don't have to. You can fork squid can take the code base and do
whatever you want with it. Just don't expect this to go into the main
squid source tree and distribution. Likewise users of an altered squid
cannot expect support from the core squid group.

Personally, I'd spend my time changing telco.

Rob

> --
> Nick Yarbrough
> Security Hacker
>
Received on Fri Apr 13 2001 - 04:57:58 MDT