Proxy To Increase Speed Of My Adsl Connextion

[yeti]

Hi,

Since last week I use the new unlimited Internet package from True (256k), works quite fine for asian servers but really slow for european servers.

I especially work on a server in Netherlands and too many bad connections.

Anyone knows a proxy that would go faster than the direct True access ?

Thxs

[george]

Proxy servers are evil! If you want canned content, use them, but if you want updated content ban them!

[lopburi3]

Agree with George. Your browser is a lot faster than a proxy if you want old content. Only if the internet were static, as in a book, would the proxy make sense. For today's internet if you need current page chances are the proxy will have to get it and then you get it from it. Too many 'its'. If you want any site other than the ordinary it will not even be on the proxy so it goes to get it and it then sends it to you. Much more time involved than if you get it yourself.

[yeti]

So you mean that I have to do with a poor connection.

Having 256k ADSL and pinging european servers in more than 500 ms...

I was thinking a proxy could help me avoid the True bottleneck to go outside of Thailand...

Because I suppose that upgrading to 512 or more wouldn't change anything...

(it would be faster between my computer and True, but wouldn't change anything between True and the server I want to access, which is the part that takes time).

[autonomous_unit]

I have to disagree with the previous posts on principle. A proxy is not necessarily a cache (what they are alluding to by "old content" is the caching effects of proxies operated by ISPs or IT departments to save bandwidth for many users rather than to speed up the experience for one). I am very happy with my own non-caching proxy on another continent. It blocks most ads so they are not downloaded over the slow link between here and there, and data sent between the continents is compressed. I forward my browser's requests through SSH to the remote host which is running privoxy.

Unfortunately, I guess this is one of those problems where if you have to ask, you might not be ready for the answer... the value comes in operating your own proxy on a remote host that is under your (or a friend's) control. A nice Unix shell account w/ SSH access would suffice.

In general web pages (but not images) are horribly bloated and can be compressed a large amount! Pages can load many times faster, but there is a downside if you frequent sites that have complex framesets or other situations where many small documents have to be loaded in order to render one displayed page... in those cases the extra latencies through the proxy can really slow you down.

Of course, you can really speed up browsing by turning off the loading of images in your browser preferences before working with the really distant sites. For well designed sites it even works. :-)

[Firefoxx]

Yes, proxies are proxies. They're not necessarily caching proxies. However, many proxies are caching proxies, and some can be configured very poorly (or conservatively). For those, you would have to hit the refresh button in order to see an updated version of your web page (and for really bad proxies, even that won't help).

True's international link is very unstable these days. I don't know if the situation will improve. Until then, you could try to find an "open" proxy in Thailand that's fast. It might take some effort to find one that's fast enough. Changing to 512k might help some, but not dramatically.

[Phil Conners]

What y'all probably don't realize is that all ISP's in Thailand route you through their own transparent proxy servers. You can avoid this by setting up an alternative proxy server in your browser though in my experience that slows things down even more.