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This month
Overcome Your Caching Conundrums [Server Side Essentials]
by dzc
ealing with browser caching is a balancing act. On one hand, you aim to minimize load times and bandwidth use by ensuring that images, scripts, and style sheets are cached by your visitors; however, you still want to ensure that they’re accessing the most recent versions of all your files.
In this article, I’ll show you a few methods for controlling how your site’s files are cached by browsers so you can achieve the best of both worlds: maintaining optimal performance while ensuring that any updates are seen immediately, without a hitch by all of your users.
October 2009
Optimize caching
by karlcow
Most web pages include resources that change infrequently, such as CSS files, image files, JavaScript files, and so on. These resources take time to download over the network, which increases the time it takes to load a web page. HTTP caching allows these resources to be saved, or cached, by a browser or proxy. Once a resource is cached, a browser or proxy can refer to the locally cached copy instead of having to download it again on subsequent visits to the web page. Thus caching is a double win: you reduce round-trip time by eliminating numerous HTTP requests for the required resources, and you substantially reduce the total payload size of the responses. Besides leading to a dramatic reduction in page load time for subsequent user visits, enabling caching can also significantly reduce the bandwidth and hosting costs for your site.
An Engineer's Guide to Bandwidth (Yahoo! Developer Network Blog)
by karlcow
& 1 other
Web app developers spend most of our time not thinking about how data is actually transmitted through the bowels of the network stack. Abstractions at the application layer let us pretend that networks read and write whole messages as smooth streams of bytes. Generally this is a good thing. But knowing what's going underneath is crucial to performance tuning and application design. The character of our users' internet connections is changing and some of the rules of thumb we rely on may need to be revised.
Sponsorised links
July 2009
CamStudio - Free Screen Recording Software
by Spone
& 10 others
CamStudio is able to record all screen and audio activity on your computer and create industry-standard AVI video files and using its built-in SWF Producer can turn those AVIs into lean, mean, bandwidth-friendly Streaming Flash videos (SWFs)
April 2009
zer01mobile unlimited cell service
by wabaus
Unlimited calls and bandwidth for $69.95/mo. on a smart phone. No contract. Pay month-to-month.
March 2009
Enabling HTTP Compression in IIS 6.0
by ERSWeb
(via)
HTTP Compression is a wonderful technology that accomplishes a lot of different things. It allows faster page serving to clients and lower server costs due to lowered bandwidth (these two being enough for me to implement). There are a handful of articles out there that explain how to implement HTTP Compression in Internet Information Server (IIS) 6.0, but I haven’t been able to find a nice step-by-step article, so I decided to set one up. In this how-to, I’ll briefly explain what HTTP Compression is and how it works in IIS 6.0, and then provide step-by-step instructions on how to implement it because it’s not as simple as flipping a switch. In fact, there are many things in multiple places on the server you have to properly configure to implement HTTP Compression.
January 2009
James Shore: The Decline and Fall of Agile
by greut
& 1 other
Or maybe we need to stop selling Agile. Maybe we need to say, "Agile is hard, and you can't master it by sitting through a two-day course." Maybe we need to be firm and say, "Sorry, if you don't use agile engineering practices, if you don't have high-bandwidth communication, and if you don't include a strong customer voice, you're not going to succeed. Try something else instead." Scrum is popular because it's easy--and that's part of the problem.
Is that linked to the cargo cult thingy?
December 2008
Featured Download: FilePhile Transfers Any Size File Between Any Two Systems
by decembre
After registering at FilePhile's site with an email address and password, you grab and install a copy of the Java-based app, launch it, and add email addresses to your buddy list. Sending a file is a simple right-click on someone's name, but you can limit the bandwidth eaten up by FilePhile in its preferences. The transfers themselves are encrypted, and, as the site boasts, can be any size. That's about it, but that's probably all you need.
November 2008
Shopify — Hosted e-commerce with style, in less than 2 minutes
by sbrothier
& 6 others
Selling online with Shopify is easy:
We take care of hosting, bandwidth,
and security, so you can focus on your business.
You are just a few minutes away from
your very own e-commerce store.
October 2008
Routeur Hack____with open-source firmware Tomato____Set Up Universal Ad Blocking Through Your Router
by decembre
"If you've turned your $60 router into a user-friendly super-router with open-source firmware Tomato, you already know that Tomato can boost your Wi-Fi signal, track bandwidth usage, and set Quality of Service rules with ease."
Box Backup - Trac
by camel
Box Backup is an open source, completely automatic, on-line backup system. It has the following key features:
* All backed up data is stored on the server in files on a filesystem - no tape, archive or other special devices are required.
* The server is trusted only to make files available when they are required - all data is encrypted and can be decoded only by the original client. This makes it ideal for backing up over an untrusted network (such as the Internet), or where the server is in an uncontrolled environment.
* A backup daemon runs on systems to be backed up, and copies encrypted data to the server when it notices changes - so backups are continuous and up-to-date (although traditional snapshot backups are possible too).
* Only changes within files are sent to the server, just like rsync, minimising the bandwidth used between clients and server. This makes it particularly suitable for backing up between distant locations, or over the Internet.
* It behaves like tape - old file versions and deleted files are available.
* Old versions of files on the server are stored as changes from the current version, minimising the storage space required on the server. Files are the server are also compressed to minimise their size.
* Choice of backup behaviour - it can be optimised for document or server backup.
* It is designed to be easy and cheap to run a server. It has a portable implementation, and optional RAID implemented in userland for reliability without complex server setup or expensive hardware.
September 2008
Monitoring Bandwidth Usage for a Xen node @ IONCANNON
by camel
After my last post on limiting bandwidth usage on a Xen node I thought I would follow up with how to monitor the bandwidth usage of a Xen node.
I chose to use netacct-mysql to monitor bandwidth and store the results into a mysql database. This isn't the only way of monitoring the bandwidth but it was easy to set up and stores the information directly into mysql without needing any extra scripts.
On the Xen setup I'm using for an example there are 3 nodes and a bucket for each node will be created in the mysql database by netacct. Setting up netacct can be tricky so you will want to check to make sure traffic for each node is going into the correct bucket.
Main Page - VbGORE Visual Basic Online RPG Engine
by jdrsantos
vbGORE is a powerful open source and free mmorpg maker / engine in development that concentrates on optimization and orpg engine features. With the help of vbGORE's fast networking and powerful graphics engine and some (although not required) knowledge in game programming in visual basic, you can create the game of your dreams without paying for a ton of bandwidth and a powerful server to support your vb game.
Cam Studio
by Fiber_Optic
& 10 others
CamStudio is able to record all screen and audio activity on your computer and create industry-standard AVI video files and using its built-in SWF Producer can turn those AVIs into lean, mean, bandwidth-friendly Streaming Flash videos (SWFs)
August 2008
Throttling qmail SMTP receive bandwidth | www.enchantedage.com
by camel
I wrote the program "throttle.c," which you can insert into the tcpserver chain of commands for a qmail smtpd server. It takes one argument: the number of kilobytes per second to let through on the incoming file descriptor. Throttle does not throttle the outgoing file descriptor, because that's usually just status from your mail server.
Additionally, throttle will set an alarm, so that any session longer than 15 minutes will expire and disconnect. This affords some amount of protection against lingering sessions that eat up your parallelism limit; I've seen such sessions from presumably trojaned DSL machines connecting to the mail server to send spam.
Last FM Open Mind Index | 77
by garret
(via)
"The LastFM Open Mind Index (OMI) is an interesting way to understand your taste in music. The index is a calculation based on your last.fm top artists of the last 12 months. The quantity of your played songs, as well as the artist-tags are reflected in the calculation. A high OMI is an indicator for a high musical bandwidth and your openness for different kind of music." Rocketsurgeon
bibliotheque OPAC.02 : Une experience pour avoir Google comme moteur de recherche dans l'opac (Get Tooled Up : 'Looking for a Google Box?')
by decembre
There are, perhaps, four directions we can take:
1. Evaluate the complete range of closed and open source offerings, pick the best, and be prepared to pay a yearly licence fee of an unknown amount
2. Develop our own private search engine, possibly based on ht://Dig [3] or egothor [4] code
3. Make use of the free Google index of our pages
4. License Google technology to do local indexing
Each route has its attractions, but the latter two are particularly attractive because of the high degree of trust in, and familiarity with, Google. But the public search has problems:
* Google cannot see inside our protected sites
* Every search transaction has to leave our site, is dependent on international networks, and uses up bandwidth
* The depth and frequency of search is not guaranteed
* Google may withdraw the service at any time
July 2008
June 2008
CSS Sliding Door using only 1 image » Loon Design
by srcmax
& 1 other
(via)
Before I know about this technique, I was using different images for each of the button I needed in a navigation bar. I found that it is not user friendly and also need more CSS coding. Besides, it is increasing the processing time and bandwidth in loading a site.
May 2008
Google AJAX Search API Blog: Speed up access to your favorite frameworks via the AJAX Libraries API
by parmentierf
(via)
The AJAX Libraries API is an attempt to make Web applications faster for developers in simple ways:
* Developers won't have to worry about getting caching setup correctly, as we will do that for you
* If another application uses the same library (much more likely), they there is a much better chance that it will be already caching on the users machine
* The network and bandwidth of the users systems will not be taxed.
Configuring Infiniband for AIX
by BlueVoodoo
Infiniband is an interconnect technology that breaks through the bandwidth and fanout limitations of PCI bus by switching from traditional shared bus architecture to a switched fabric architecture. This article explains how to use RDS (Reliable Datagram Sockets), a protocol (similar to UDP) designed to work over Infiniband to send and receive data using sockets.
PNGCrusher 1.2 software download - Mac OS X - VersionTracker
by sbrothier
PNGCrusher is a simple app that optimizes the filesize of PNG images. Just drag any number of PNG files onto the app and they will be processed by the open source OptiPNG, which provides better compression rates than the standard pngcrush. If you deal with png images a lot, especially in web development, this app could save you time and bandwidth!
April 2008
Error 453 Not Enough Bandwith
by tehu
(via)
"Honestly, I think Comcast should give me my service for free and let's work to create new services that use more bandwidth so they can sell them to customers as part of the upsell to people who use a lot of bandwidth." // Dave Winer, précurseur du Web 2.0
