Mike, I take your point ref: the differences between AFS sharing v. FTP access. And yes, I think members of RIPE are aware of the potential savings esp. here in Europe where bandwidth tends to be very expensive. Then there is also the matter of educating end users - that would also help and I feel we've not done a great job of it. Best regards, Dave
From: Dave Morton <Dave.Morton@ecrc.de> To: ripe@ripe.net, schwartz@latour.cs.colorado.edu Subject: Re: Caching in Europe?
Mike, How would this compare to AFS for example ?
Dave,
AFS does whole file caching at each client, primarily to reduce file server load. In conrtrast, our study suggests placing caches within the network to reduce duplicate transmissions across individual links.
AFS evolved from a system originally built to support easy access to files from anywhere in a moderately large university community. In such an environment there isn't much widespread sharing - most files are accessed by one or a handful of users working on a project together, as opposed to thousands of sites retrieving the same popular FTP files. In our study we found that half of all FTP data by volume crossing a particular network link were duplicate transmissions of files that had previously traversed that link. - Mike