[master] 6296c7a Caching is still important.

Poul-Henning Kamp phk at FreeBSD.org
Wed Mar 23 23:16:04 CET 2016


commit 6296c7a35c8642dc1587041bfa27fc187e8a1acf
Author: Poul-Henning Kamp <phk at FreeBSD.org>
Date:   Wed Mar 23 22:14:03 2016 +0000

    Caching is still important.

diff --git a/doc/sphinx/phk/farfaraway.rst b/doc/sphinx/phk/farfaraway.rst
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..5cc8271
--- /dev/null
+++ b/doc/sphinx/phk/farfaraway.rst
@@ -0,0 +1,80 @@
+.. _phk_farfaraway:
+
+=============
+Far, far away
+=============
+
+I realize I'm showing my age when I admit that Slades 1974 hit `"Far
+Far Away" <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gqCCAb8xbw>`_ was one
+of the first rock-ballads I truly loved.  (In case you have never
+heard of Slade or the 1970'ies british glam-rock, you may want to
+protect your innocence and *not* click on that link.)
+
+Some years back I got invited to a conference in New Zealand, and
+that is "far far away" from Denmark.  So far away in fact, that I
+downloaded the entire 
+`Bell Systems Technical Journal <https://archive.org/details/bstj-archives>`_
+to my Kobo eReader in order to have something to do during the 24
+hour air-traffic "experience".
+
+BSTJ is good reading, for instance you learn tha they invented 
+`Agile Programming <https://archive.org/stream/bstj62-7-2365#page/n21/mode/2up>`_
+back in 1983, but failed to come up with a hip name.
+
+Anyway, Internet Access in New Zealand is like time-travel back to
+around Y2K or so, and when one of my time-nuts friends launched a
+`Kickstarter project <https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1575992013/kiwisdr-beaglebone-software-defined-radio-sdr-with>`_ it didn't take much before his residental connection folded.
+
+As it happens, I am in the process of setting up the new Varnish-Cache.org
+project server just now, generously sponsored/donated by `RootBSD.com
+<https://www.RootBSD.com>`_, so it was natural for me to offer to
+help him out.
+
+I don't need to explain varnishhist to this audience::
+
+
+			|
+			|
+			||
+			||
+			||
+			||
+			||                             
+			||
+			||                             
+			||
+			||
+			||
+			||                            ##
+		       |||                            ##
+		       |||                         #  ## #
+		      |||||                        #  #####
+	+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------
+	|1e-6   |1e-5   |1e-4   |1e-3   |1e-2   |1e-1   |1e0    |1e1    |1e2
+
+Most of us who live in civilized places, tend to forget that the InterNet
+is very unevenly distributed.
+
+My ISP enabled IPv6 on the VDSL2+ line to my beach-house today,
+some people have fiber, but in terms head-count, the majority of
+the world has really horrible internet connections.
+
+In some cases it is the last mile, for instance if you live out at some
+remote fjord in Norway.
+
+In other cases it is a mid-net bottle-neck, in the case of New
+Zealand a shortage of transoceanic fiber cables [#f1]_ .
+
+Caching is not a cure-all, it is far from a miracle cure, even thought it
+might seem that way sometimes.
+
+But as prophylactic for bandwidth troubles, it is second to none.
+
+*phk*
+
+.. [#f1] These `BSTJ articles about the first Atlantic phone cable
+   <https://archive.org/details/bstj-archives?&and[]=bstj%20%201957-1-1>`_
+   will give you an appreciation of why that is not a trivial problem
+   to solve.
+
+
diff --git a/doc/sphinx/phk/index.rst b/doc/sphinx/phk/index.rst
index 0556769..60e2846 100644
--- a/doc/sphinx/phk/index.rst
+++ b/doc/sphinx/phk/index.rst
@@ -8,6 +8,7 @@ You may or may not want to know what Poul-Henning thinks.
 .. toctree::
 	:maxdepth: 1
 
+	farfaraway.rst
 	thatslow.rst
 	firstdesign.rst
 	10goingon50.rst



More information about the varnish-commit mailing list