they think i'm nuts on artera web accelerator

[ttomm46]

[PCguy]

Who cares what others think. As long as it makes you happy, go for it. Faster is always better.

BTW, I usually stick to the watch thing just like you. Call me stupid.

[amb141]

Tom

I'd be interested to know if the web accelerator you use still is as effective a couple of months from now as it is now when you have just started using it. I have never used a web accelerator but I do have a couple of problems with the whole concept.

Web accelerators work by 1) image compression, 2) proxy caching of IP addresses and webpages and 3) by use of pre-fetch techniques.

Many people find the compressed images to be unacceptable. Reduce the compression and you also reduce the "speed" increase.

I wonder what will happen when the IP address in the proxy cache goes stale. Will you be able to access web pages at all? Or will the request take you to the stale IP address?

As far as proxy-cached webpages, how does this differ (in a practical sense) from the webpages which are stored in your browser cache. People clean out their browser caches for reasons unclear to me. Yes a corrupt TIF can be a problem -- but why flush the browser cache until you HAVE to. I don't know the answer to that but personally I never delete TIFs until my browser (Firebird 0.7) starts to misbehave.

And finally, pre-fetch. While it certainly will speed up your surfing if the links on a page are "fetched" in the background, imagine what would happen if this kind of pre-fetching became more universal. Thousands (millions!) of requests would be sent for pages which may OR MAY NOT even be read. There is some thought (I don't know how realistic) that wholesale use of pre-fetching techniques will eventually bring the whole web crashing down in a torrent of largely meaningless requests.

So keep us informed. If you find that, over time, pages that used to be accessible become inaccessable or that compressed images are not acceptably clear it would be interesting to hear about it. If not -- even better!

alan

[Restek]

[amb141]

Tom and all

There are some steps you can take to speed up web-browsing on a dialup connection without using a web accelerator. Since I've never used a web-accelerator (like NetZero's or Juno's "High-Speed" or WebRocket or Netsonic, etc.) I can't say how these steps may compare to such products, but I can say that I certainly get around the web MUCH faster than I used to.

Some or all of these techniques may have been discussed here (I'm new) but what the heck....

1) Eliminate the competition. Adware and Spyware steal YOUR bandwidth to do THEIR business. So use AdAware (free at ) and/or Spybot Search & Destroy (free at ) and/or Pest Patrol ($40 at ) to keep adware and spyware off your machine.

2) Use a browser that renders webpages faster than Internet Explorer. Mozilla, Mozilla Firebird (now, as of the 0.8 beta, "Firefox"). Opera, and K-Meleon all make IE feel like a Model T on a muddy road. They are more secure, to boot.

3) Don't let advertisements load. I hesitate to recommend this since without ads many worthy websites would not be able to survive and if ad blocking becomes universal some other way of raising revenue would have to be found. But speaking only about web-browsing speed -- ads take time to load. There are many ad blockers on the market, Mozilla Firebird can short circuit ads by adding a few simple lines of jscript to the user.js file.

4) Resolve scum sites to the local host. Go to and download the .zip file there. Unzip in Windows\HOSTS (check the mvps site for exact path for your OS) and the list of scumware sites will be resolved to the 127.0.0.1 local host (your own computer) and they won't load.

5) Take a look at ExtraDNS ($30 at http://www.extratools.com) This neat program will cache IP addresses as you visit sites eliminating the need to resolve the host through the DNS. In addition, ExtraDNS will allow you to poll up to 10 DNS servers simultaneously (rather than the 2 DNS servers that your ISP polls sequentially) when attempting to resolve a host for a site you are visiting for the first time. The first DNS server to respond is the one ExtraDNS uses to resolve the host. Now it usually takes less than a half second to resolve a host -- but keeping sites' IPs in the cache on your computer eliminates even this delay. This might seem like no big deal -- but remember each website usually has to resolve a number of hosts per page. In the course of a couple of hours or websurfing it can really add up. (BTW -- ExtraDNS keeps its cache scrupulously up to date.)

6) Finally, take advantage of your browser cache. Set a fairly small cache (15 - 20 MB), set yur browser to check for new versions of web pages "as needed", and then DON'T FLUSH your browser cache unless your browser starts to act wonky.

alan