WAN Acceleration --- Caching WAN

T

ToddW2

2[H]4U
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Nov 8, 2004
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Now that I've been on my T1 for a few days it's rather apparent nothing is cached upstream. On my 3G connection I`m not sure if Verizon runs Cache appliances or what but I never felt like I was "Reloading" the same assets 2hrs later.

Currently I visit a site it loads slow 1st time while downloading all assets, browse around local cache takes care of it and it's super fast. Come back in an hour? Two? and it does the initial hit to download to local cache.

I`m wanting to run some type of caching appliance or custom setup (server I configure) so that I can speed up my page loads and lower my requests to the "internet".

I have no clue where to start looking or what to look for.

All I've seen is:
https://www.sonicwall.com/us/en/products/WXA_Series.html#tab=models

And it's a bit out of my budget :D

I'd prefer to do something on an Intel NUC w/RAMDISK & SSD. <$500

What are my options?
 
As far as I can tell T1 should have rather low latency but given the rather high amount of data sites/pages uses these days I guess it doesn't hurt to cache. You might want to look into running the Oops! Proxy Server which isn't as hard to configure compared to squid. http://www.oops-cache.org/about.html

Also keep in mind that if you don't do any shaping on your connection browsing is going to be slow with or without a cache. As for hardware you'll be fine with an old P2 or such, SSDs etc are pretty much as waste of money as all caching proxies tries to serve frequently visited sites/pages out of memory.

You'll learn a lot more by running FreeBSD (my personal choice)/Debian/* than an appliance but it boils down to how much time you want to spend and how much you actually want to learn. This machine should also preferably unless you like having a lot of boxes around act as your router/gateway firmware.

..and btw, don't try to cache windows update(s) unless you like funny issues due to the way it works.
//Danne
 
WAN acceleration on sonicwall is not what you think it is. Its more akin to Branchcache on windows server it just accelerates certain file transfers between sites via a vpn.
 
diizzy said:
As far as I can tell T1 should have rather low latency but given the rather high amount of data sites/pages uses these days I guess it doesn't hurt to cache. You might want to look into running the Oops! Proxy Server which isn't as hard to configure compared to squid. http://www.oops-cache.org/about.html

Also keep in mind that if you don't do any shaping on your connection browsing is going to be slow with or without a cache. As for hardware you'll be fine with an old P2 or such, SSDs etc are pretty much as waste of money as all caching proxies tries to serve frequently visited sites/pages out of memory.

You'll learn a lot more by running FreeBSD (my personal choice)/Debian/* than an appliance but it boils down to how much time you want to spend and how much you actually want to learn. This machine should also preferably unless you like having a lot of boxes around act as your router/gateway firmware.

..and btw, don't try to cache windows update(s) unless you like funny issues due to the way it works.
//Danne
Click to expand...

Thanks for the information. The T1 does have very low latency <40ms most of the time which is 2x+ better than I was getting before, and it's not that it loads pages slow it's great. But, if my wife is browsing or looking at pics and I try to browse and look at pics I can feel the delay before my requests are returned and then bam I get all the data instantly when the pipe opens up.

If you could elaborate on shaping I'd appreciate that.
 
It might not be as bad as it sounds but given that you seem to use this as a residential connection I assume you have numerous devices that uses this connection in one way or another. Given the rather limited upload (there's no point in shaping download/incoming traffic) you might want to prioritize some types of traffic depending on what you mainly use your connection for such as dns, http, https and ssh. You might also want to consider ACKs depending on usage, this may to some extent make your connection to appear faster than what it really is since you're optimizing the traffic flow.
//Danne
 
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