Newcomer Is A Real Page-turner
Sydney Morning Herald
Tuesday October 12, 1999
THE main reason for dissatisfaction among Internet subscribers is obvious: slow downloads. And there can be no real solution while most consumers rely on modems.
But in the meantime, a number of companies are marketing products that aim to ease this problem for the Internet industry.
One of these is CacheFlow, a young start-up company that has developed a network appliance specifically designed to cache Internet content.
Internet caches, also often called proxy servers, work by storing frequently accessed Web content on a hard drive; when a user goes to visit a popular Web site, the content is delivered from the cache.
This speeds up response time dramatically, since users are retrieving content from a server in the same city instead of one on the other side of the world.
Unlike the many widely used proxy server applications on the market, CacheFlow has developed a purpose-built device that does nothing but cache Internet content. Its Internet appliance, so called because it's designed simply to be plugged into a network and start working, stores up to 243 gigabytes of Web content.
The CacheFlow boxes run using a customised operating system - called CacheOS and built by the Canadian company Scalable Software Solutions - with a file system that has been optimised for caching. Every cache can be configured to automatically refresh particular content, which is important for news and other sites where the content changes frequently. But while most caches refresh an entire Web page at a time, CacheOS breaks up the graphics, text and other elements that make up each Web page. This means that even though text content might be refreshed, graphics such as company logos - which load slowly and rarely change - will always be loaded from the cache.
This design, says the director of systems engineering, Rich Holstein, allows the caches to speed response time by an average of 25 to 35 per cent. "We track how often an object is accessed and how often it's changed in the past, and how popular it is," he says. "We can cache content locally, dramatically increase speed and overall make the Web a better user experience."
The Internet appliance approach is expected to catch on quickly, providing easy-to-configure devices specialised to perform particular functions.
"Having the operating system facilitate a specific application or task increases the efficiency of both the application and the processor," says Graham Penn, the general manager of research at IDC Australia.
"The elimination of complexity - including unnecessary hard drives, intricate installation steps, complicated user interfaces and configurations - not only reduces the knowledge required to run the unit, but also increases the system's reliability and availability."
© 1999 Sydney Morning Herald