[Rabbit-dev] Prefetch possibility

[Samat K Jain]

On 02/02/2012 11:30 AM, Bill wrote:
> My multilink ppp modem setup is like wireshark in that it is sooo slow I can see each dns negotiation in the status bar of firefox as they happen.:)

Setup a local (i.e. on your home network) DNS server. I recommend pdnsd.

Most Web browsers (Firefox, at least) have an option to have the proxy 
server perform DNS requests for you. Unfortunately, AFAIK this only 
works for SOCKS proxies—it won't work w/ RabbIT, which is an HTTP proxy.

> My 2G cellular is no better.
>
> With that in mind, I've sold my soul to the satellite devil (the price you have to pay to get internet in america).
>
> Satellite = latency.  1 to 1.5 SECONDS per transaction.

I feel for you. I was with WildBlue in the US; my median RTT was 1.4s. 
I've since switched to 4G LTE and while it's still unreliable and 
expensive at least RTTs are below 100ms.

> I'm terrified that these busy sites like CNN and Google News will crawl due to latency.
>
> Does Rabbit have a feature to prefetch all site references, assemble the page on the server site, and send me like a "zip bundle" of the page?  Instead of a transaction for each element on the page, send me 1 zip file containing all of the page.
>
> Would this be hard to implement?
>
> This should also help modemers as it would dramaticly cut down on the http overhead.

You might want to look into a feature called "HTTP pipelining". RabbIT 
supports this relatively well (and is one of the few proxies that does; 
Squid's support is terrible).

Normally, your browser requests a resource, waits for it to be received, 
requests another, etc. With pipelining (aka multiplexing), your browser 
sends all the requests at once. If the remote server supports it (not 
enough do), it cuts down latency significantly.

-- 
Samat K Jain <http://samat.org/> ▪ GPG: 0x4A456FBA