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May 04, 2005
Web Acceleration
Google has relased a free Web Accelerator [google.com] that targets broadband users. I always wondered what exactly a web accelerator did besides cache pages and the marketing blurbs provided an answer.
Google Web Accelerator uses various strategies to make your web pages load faster, including:
- Sending your page requests through Google machines dedicated to handling Google Web Accelerator traffic.
- Storing copies of frequently looked at pages to make them quickly accessible.
- Downloading only the updates if a web page has changed slightly since you last viewed it.
- Prefetching certain pages onto your computer in advance.
- Managing your Internet connection to reduce delays.
- Compressing data before sending it to your computer.
So they not only cache, but compress and implement http pipelining where the target (source) server didn't or can't.
Either way, I'll try it and report back on my experiences. That Google, they're taking over the world while "do[ing] no evil", quite impressive. I'm sure that this will help with the slashdot effect too.
Posted by Guy at May 4, 2005 08:41 PM