On 21/10/12 00:48, Tim wrote:
Bob Goodwin:
So it looks like my ISP is what it is and I probably can't change
things without degrading the service I have now which is quite good
then it works. Their are minor glitches that I have not been able to
assign the blame for, it occasionally requires re-booting either the
Viasat "modem" or my router, or both amidst a lot of confusion with
my daughter trying to do something important to her on her Mac
downstairs.
Proxying, of one kind or another, seems to be a common approach for
dealing with an inadequate network (network bandwidth, latency, et
cetera), rather than improving the actual problem. In your ISP's case,
it sounds like having to go through satellites is the main reason - they
have a significant propagation delay. I've use an ISP that went through
one, before, and it was quite awful. Using my own DNS helped, because
their DNS serving was even slower than the rest of their traffic.
The propagation delay may seem awful but the end result is a system
an order of magnitude better than our other option which was wired
dial-up. We suffered with that for several years until this became
available to us and switched, never looked back! The delay is not
normally apparent once you understand that stuff like telephone
conversations will not run smoothly with a couple seconds of delay.
The cell phones work, cheap international calling would be nice but
we do without that now.
Proxying can only speed things up, for you, if you access something that
someone else has already accessed before you. *And* if that data is
cacheable. If it's not cacheable, or you're always getting new data,
then it can't speed things up. In fact, you get an even slower
response, as the proxy has to fetch it, first, then you get it next.
I've been on ISPs that have introduced transparent proxies, and my
experience is that it doesn't improve things. Much of the web isn't
cacheable. On the other hand, they can be useful in a LAN. Windows
updates, for instance, were a hell of a lot quicker on the second PC to
do its updates. The first one dragged them into the proxy's cache, the
second PC got them from the cache. And when you're in an office where
someone passes around a link for others to look at, they get the same
speed benefit.
Your LAN is generally much faster than your connection to your ISP, so
that bottleneck is avoided with your own caching proxy, but not with an
external one. Even more so if the external one is badly implemented, or
overloaded with too many clients.
Yes, our LAN is much faster than the internet connection using fast
routers and access devices and "gigabit" Ethernet. Wildblue claims
to provide 12 Mbps service and they usually do, I often see better
than 20 Mbps on small [12 meg] files when running one of the on-line
tests. The main disadvantage is the limitation on usage, if it goes
over 25 gigs per month the cost rises exponentially. My daughter has
one "cloud" account and managed to suck up 7 gigs in a couple of
hours last month, but normally we are comfortable with our b.w.
allotment.
Chances are that if your ISP is proxying DNS, then they may be proxying
HTTP traffic. So, if you were to bypass their DNS proxy, you might also
have to bypass their HTTP one. That'd require an external, better,
proxy. The technique being how dissidents bypass government filtering.
If it's just one or two specific sites that are continual problems with
the proxying, you might try mentioning them to your ISP. Dynamic sites,
ones where the content of the pages are continually changing, like those
doing sales and auctions, shouldn't be cached. Your ISP may be able to
change parameters for how they handle such things. They've probably,
already, had to treat sites like ebay differently than other static
sites. But they won't know about other more obscure sites.
All things considered, the ISP people are professionals, I am an
amateur and it seems unlikely that I will beat them at their game.
So what it boils down to is I am doing things for my own amusement,
and just need to be careful not to leave the system in bad shape out
of consideration for other users. When here alone I can do what I
want but need to keep things working at other times.
If you're resigned to having to reset every now and then, why not
schedule it regularly? e.g. Unplug your modem and/or router for a few
minutes while your making breakfast, each morning. Or some other time
that you're highly unlikely to be using the internet. See if that makes
any difference to network reliability over a few weeks.
Yes, that would be the sort of approach I might take if I am
bothered enough with system failures, I haven't reached that point yet.
Thanks for the help,
Bob
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