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Caches drive the internet. They are orders of magnitude more important than compression. 99.99% of requests hit a local cache. (1) Compression is important to
by sgt101 3y ago
Caches drive the internet.
They are orders of magnitude more important than compression. 99.99% of requests hit a local cache. (1)
Compression is important too.
(1) I worked in a telco. Check it out for yourself!
- asah 3y agoboth are correct. The internet is "driven" by web/mobile which is driven by multimedia, which lives and dies on compression / codecs.
- Solvency 3y agoOk how do they work then?
- parl_match 3y agoThere's lot of information about this on the open web, and tons of resources for varying levels of skill.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- astrange 3y agoIronically, this answer is a cache miss.
- esafak 3y agoThey store frequently-requested items in a place that permits faster retrieval. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cache_(computing) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cache_(computing)
- psychphysic 3y agoWait maybe we should be using the Huffman encoding at the cache level! I'm not sure what that would mean... Maybe if you're website is unpopular we move your server to North Korea since no one is accessing it anyways?
- anvuong 3y agoYeah it's cache all the way down. CPU has L1, L2, L3 for instructions cache. Server has ramcache, then SSD cache. Then apps with SQL almost always use redis/memcache as first level cache. Then for network side we have CDN which is basically a glorified webcache, even at router/switch there is cache for all the stuffs.
- brookst 3y agoIndeed. And ultimately human neurons cache and we only scroll back, reload the page, or go back to the website when our cache ages out or the request isn’t cached yet.
- themoonisachees 3y agoMost serverside processors will only compile pages once they're hit and cache thz results. As the xkcd goes "there's a lot of caching"
- Ma8ee 3y agoI don't think your caches would help very much if all media were sent uncompressed. Everything is already compressed, so you might not think about it much, but I'd say that it is at least as important as caching.
- number6 3y agoCompression is so ubiquitous that people tend to forget it's there. I still encounter people wondering why zipping their movie files does not result in a smaller file size
- iforgotpassword 3y agoIs it still? Afaik now with everything HTTPS, caching proxies on the ISP end are completely useless. We instead now see (proprietary?) cache boxes by big players like YouTube and Netflix that ISPs can install in their DCs, but that seems less elegant, even though it gives the content providers much greater control over what, when and how much gets cached. Still, as a smaller fish, without going with cloudflare, there's no caching involved anymore, probably not even if I decide to run my site on HTTP only.
- cm2187 3y agoHe perhaps meant bandwidth and not requests. Netflix and youtube alone must constitute the bulk of the volume and I believe they are fairly aggressively cached, then you have all the assets stored on CDNs.
- meinheld111 3y agoA CDN is a cache as are the Netflix/fb/etc local boxes. CPUs have three layers of cache before hitting main memory, which could be considered a cache for persistent storage… Yes, still
- Null-Set 3y agoHow do these cache boxes work? Does the server send them its half of the ephemeral key or something? I can't imagine each isp has a box with a copy of netflix's private key.
- ninkendo 3y agoThey terminate TLS at the cache box and use a different connection altogether from the cache box to the upstream server. (Said tunnel to upstream could simply be another TLS connection, or wireguard, or IPsec, etc etc.)
- alex_duf 3y agoIt's a bit silly to oppose these two technologies... Caches also rely on compression to be efficient, they work hand in hand.
- meinheld111 3y agoForemost a cache relies upon uneven access patterns, which most real world use cases are
- throwaway892238 3y agoThis is why I was flabbergasted by the nonsense internet takeover of HTTPS. You can't cache it. Probably 99% of web traffic is generic public content, but we can't cache any of it, because 1% of it needs to be private. So then people complain "oh but The Illuminati can see what websites I'm going to!" Yeah, and they still can with HTTPS, it's called statistical network traffic analysis. Decades of research papers show you can uniquely identify a client going to a random internet server (and the page they're browsing) just by sniffing a bunch of POPs. It's used by law enforcement and Five Eyes to identify internet users around the world. Even protocols that have countermeasures (TOR) don't stand up to it.
- bhickey 3y agoTell me you've never worked on a CDN without telling me you've never worked on CDN. Compared to transit, last mile bandwidth is effectively limitless and free. Cache fill at the edge is important, last mile caching not so much.
- jakub_g 3y agoHTTPS everywhere is not only about privacy but also about integrity. You don't want internet randos (including ISPs) to swap your content with ads, bitcoin miners and put other batshit crazy JavaScript in it. Also, a lot of ISPs blackbox caching proxies were buggy and breaking websites.
- dmytrish 3y ago