Possible 10% speed improvement for browsing

D

donn

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I'm not going to do an M-Web on you and claim that its "3x faster" or any such rubbish. But this is what I have stumbled upon ...

I installed "FreeProxy" from http://www.handcraftedsoftware.org on my home PC (Windows 98SE) because I am setting up a small home LAN for the PC and my laptop. The PC connects to MyWireless using the USB connector, and so I needed a proxy server to allow the laptop to connect to the web.

I have set up the PC browser to use the proxy as well, just to test if it works. And bingo! Web pages seem to download faster.

I ran the Sentech Speed Test and got 97Kbps, which is about 10-12Kbps faster than what I usually get. Also, visits to my normal list of web pages, such as the BBC news site and myadsl forum, seem to be a bit faster, say by about 10% or so.

Note: I am not caching any files to disk. By default the FreeProxy has caching turned off. I guess the proxy may be a bit more effective at downloading pages than my IE browser, I don't know. But it seems to be making a differnce. I have also cleared the browser cache, so it isn't that either.

Time will tell, so I'll keep you posted. If anyone else wants to try this experiment and post your results, I'd be interested to know what happens. I found FreeProxy on tucows, but downloaded version 3.81 directly from the developer's web site.

<hr noshade size="1">
Donn Edwards <font size="2"><div align="right">MyWireless: Diva-style reliability, dial-up performance (or worse)</div id="right"></font id="size2">
<font size="1">“If our government ever goes bad, as sometimes happens in a democracy... As we extrapolate our [surveillance] technologies into the future, if the incumbency has that political advantage over their opposition, then if a bad government ever comes to power, <b>it may be the last government we ever elect</b>.” See http://privacy.4mg.com </font id="size1">
 
Why have you disabled caching? EDIT:Your <s>effective</s> <i>perceived</i> speed will be even better with caching.

<i>Sold my soul to the great Satan: Telkom ADSL. Yes they're evil but still better than Sentech</i>
 
I don't see why your speed test will be quicker, unless it's a file download that has been cached, but then it would be quite a bit quicker. Browsing sites you visit often will definitely benifit from a proxy, though. For ordinary browsing it's actually possible to share a single dial-up modem connection between two people if you use a proper proxy.

Speaking of which, does anyone know of a good, easy to install (so I can instruct the folks to do so) build of squid for windows?

B.T.W. IE isn't the fastest browser around. The most annoying thing about IE for me is the tendancy to not render a page until the whole thing is downloaded. Then one pic takes ages and you see nothing. I've seen this happen on so many sites, and it seems completely random. Even www.google.com. Never got that in Opera or FireFox/Mozilla

--
koffiejunkie
 
Er, I've been getting 512k international since about 5ish today

Could have something to do with it?

<font size="1">
Selling my soul to Telkom for better internet speeds.

Person Me = New Person();
while (Me.Alive)
{
try
{
Me.Drink(Alcohol.Any);
}
catch (HeaveException h)
{
Me.PrayToCeramicGod();
Me.Promise("Never again");
}
}
Me.Dispose();
</font id="size1">
 
hell... sentech is consistent...

I consistently get ---

19.12 Kbps (2.39 KBps)
21.84 Kbps (2.73 KBps)
18.88 Kbps (2.36 KBps)

however I have noticed where spikes going over 50%... but something just aint
letting the speed some through...

Lets try another speed test website

running 10s outbound test (client to server) . . . . . 17.57Kb/s
running 10s inbound test (server to client) . . . . . . 34.23kb/

running 10s outbound test (client to server) . . . . . 43.49Kb/s
running 10s inbound test (server to client) . . . . . . 12.64kb/s

uh huh... consistency... see
should we try another site?

That site simply wigged out... I think I heard it laugh at my speeds...

What you will note about Sentech is they ARE consistent:

They Consistently lie
Consistently deliver GREAT sub-standard speeds
They consistently working on improving our connection... which has been going on for 2 months.

Sentech give up... you cant pull the wool over our eyes... we are many you are ONE.




myWireless 128, 64, 48, 16 - depends on its mood.
 
From the last communication I had with Sentech those spikes are due to "bursting" being enabled on their bandwidth manager....

I could be wrong ...
 
My only conclusion from all of this is that somehow the FreeProxy http requests are more efficient/effective than Internet Explorer when used on MyWireless.

But something else has definitely changed. While downloading Ad-Aware from tucows.is.co.za today the download speed started at 21KBps and then slowed down to 11KBps by the end of the download. So maybe the "bursting" theory applies, i don't know.

But this is a new month and Winston Smith has reinvented what "128k shared" means ... again!

In the meantime I have had to de-install FreeProxy because it doesn't proxy RealAdio stuff. Now I'm using the Fortech Proxy+ product, and it seems to have gone back to the older speeds. Perhaps the FreeProxy program collects the entire HTML page before requesting all the other bits, like graphics and so on. I'm not sure.

<hr noshade size="1">
Donn Edwards <font size="2"><div align="right">MyWireless: Diva-style reliability, dial-up performance (or worse)</div id="right"></font id="size2">
<font size="1">“If our government ever goes bad, as sometimes happens in a democracy... As we extrapolate our [surveillance] technologies into the future, if the incumbency has that political advantage over their opposition, then if a bad government ever comes to power, <b>it may be the last government we ever elect</b>.” See http://privacy.4mg.com </font id="size1">
 
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