Google enables caching in users' browsers but not by enterprises or ISPs

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: Brett Glass <brett () lariat net>
Date: June 15, 2009 6:31:05 PM EDT
To: "David Farber" <dave () farber net>, "Ip ip" <ip () v2 listbox com>
Cc: "Dewayne Hendricks" <dewayne () warpspeed com>
Subject: Google enables caching in users' browsers but not by  
enterprises or ISPs

[Explanation expanded and typo in URL corrected - BG]

Everyone:

According to the blog posting at

http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2009/06/browsers-cache-youtube-videos.html

Google is now -- at long last -- enabling users' browsers to cache  
YouTube videos, rather than fetching them again each time they are  
played.

Unfortunately, I have just verified that while a browser can now cache  
YouTube videos to allow for a faster replay, YouTube is still  
preventing caching of its video files by a standards-conforming Web  
cache, such as Squid, operated by a company, an academic institution,  
or an ISP upstream of the end user. It thus continues to prevent these  
entities from eliminating wasteful, duplicative downloads or from  
accelerating the retrieval of videos which are viewed by more than one  
user.

While Google's blog claims that enabling browser caching is an  
"incredible" achievement, there does not seem to be much that is  
"incredible" here -- except, perhaps, an incredible waste of expensive  
bandwidth due to the company's continued failure to be compatible with  
Internet best practices and standards.

For this reason, ISPs and enterprises may be well justified in  
limiting the bandwidth that YouTube can squander. Fortunately, the  
Squid Web caching software has a feature called "delay pools" that can  
do just that. Just add the following to the squid.conf configuration  
file:

delay_pools 1
delay_class 1 1
acl youtube dstdomain .youtube.com
delay_parameters 1 250000/250000
delay_access 1 allow youtube

This limits YouTube to 1 Mbps of your valuable bandwidth.

I would suggest that IT managers, especially at companies and  
universities, who don't want their bandwidth consumed by needlessly  
uncacheable content install these settings until Google puts an end to  
its current bandwidth-wasting practices.

--Brett Glass





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