Web accelerators -- do they work?

I've not found any that make a significant difference without even more significant downsides.

Download managing software is useful for resumption of interrupted downloads but most web accelerators are adware trying to sound useful.

The mechanics of the internet is such that while little things can be improved the actual connection is determined by factors outside your computer.

Some of the programs do simple things like up your browser cache and then serve you ads for the "favor".

In my experience, none of the available "Wed Accellerators" do a damned thing of value. If dialup is your only option, about your only option is to look at multi-link; your ISP configures your account, at extra charge, of course, to allow 2 or more modems, each operating on its own phone line, which of course costs extra for each phone line. There are a couple decent outboard twin modems available; I've had success with 3Com's 3C-888 "OfficeConnect Dual 56K Lan Modem, and Windows itself has provision for using more than one modem ... provided you have more than one modem and more than one phoneline.

One of the ISP's, (Earthlink maybe?) tries to cache as much as possible for you to help speed things up a bit. That would really be the only thing that may help.

Earthlink does that yes, AOL 9.0 does caching the best (but they have so many downsides that they aren't worth it).

AOL does many different caches, it actually is so overdone that it hurts web funcionality (many pages don't work with AOL due to their complicated system).

Ultimately the webdesigner must help. Here, for example, I send all the pages to the user gzipped and use sever side caching to speed things up. It's not too noticable on the forums because you are querying a database live but you'll probably find that the static portal pages load very very quickly.

What ya need to do is tell all those sites that are overburdened with flash that they lost a visitor by not designing for narrowband.

Yeah, Timber -- we just got an email from our server offering multilink but after I'd read through the entire thing, it turns out that our cowpath is not included! I think the best bet for me is to wait until the local -- what's it called? T-line plus antenna -- server puts up a tower in my area. But somewhere I read that at the last convention there was a web accelerator that actually does work -- it resides at the server, though, not one's own machine.

Web accelerators
I think web accelerators are pretty much an example of "if it sounds to good to be true, it probably".

Web accelerators
...."if it sounds to good to be true, it probably is"



Sorry about that.

I like them both, Tom! The first seems more accurate because it reflects the tendency of most software to get you just so far but not totally where you want to go!