Looks to me like data comes in three main flavors: 1) One information source, many information sinks. Information is different for each person (state information). Typically small. 2) One information soure, many information sinks. Information is the same for each person, i.e. pictures on website etc. Typically fairly large. 3) Many information sources, many information sinks. Information is different for each person, i.e. phone calls. Conference calls, interactive video games and so on fall under category 3 even though one computer coordinates the many to many flow of information.. Optimizing networks should take the nature of the data into account. Caching works for type 2, it doesn't for 1+3. One could further segment data by real-time requirements. This is more of a lower bound on things since it doesn't change the underlying nature of the data. In other words the timeframe in which data has to get from the information source to the information sink before the communication is negatively impacted. Examples would be minutes for email, seconds for credit-card authorization, but only tens of millieseconds for voice communication or video games. Dirk On Fri, 17 Jan 1997, Rodney Joffe wrote:

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-----Original Message----- From: dave o'leary [SMTP:doleary@cisco.com] Sent: Friday, January 17, 1997 3:18 PM To: Howard C. Berkowitz Cc: Dorian R. Kim; Brett L. Hawn; Michael Dillon; nanog@merit.edu Subject: Re: Info on MAE-EAST

At 7:00 -0800 1/16/97, Howard C. Berkowitz wrote:

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Web cacheing would seem to encourage traffic to stay local.

ahhh....yup.

dave

Web Cacheing would seem to be good, except that with most commercial interactive web sites, you have to deal with state. And until you can guarantee that the entire state will always be carried by the client (no Ziff Davis cookie deleter), cacheing is only a partial panacea. rodney

Rodney Joffe Chief Technology Officer Genuity Inc., a Bechtel company http://www.genuity.net

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