Tim wrote:
Proxying can only speed things up, for you, if you access something
that
someone else has already accessed before you. *And* if that data is
cacheable.
In general, true.
It doesn’t sound as though this service is conventional proxying,
though. It sounds like they’re dynamically rewriting web pages to reduce
the number of TCP/IP round trips. Since a round trip via a satellite
takes about half a second, there’s a lot of scope for speeding things
up.
I’ve been involved with a similar problem, with a site with lots of
small graphics hosted in the UK, and customers in Australia. Putting the
graphics on a content delivery network with Australian servers knocked
five seconds off page load time. Fedora netem was very useful in
demonstrating the effect of the ~0.3s round trip time.
James.
--
E-mail: james@ | “As for Nitel, the state telephone monopoly, the less
aprilcottage.co.uk | said the better, which might well be the company’s
| motto.”
| -- The Economist, about Nigeria