America On-Line: will it survive ...? Message Board

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Technology Stocks : America On-Line: will it survive ...?

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To: Louis Cristiano who wrote (4799)	9/14/1997 7:30:00 PM
From: Art Stone	of 13594

A few days ago I installed my (free 50 hours) AOL software expecting some really terrific graphics, sites etc. I was curious to see how much better it was over my AT&T IP and Netscape browser. What I found was the connection to be slower, the graphics inferior etc. Can anyone explain to me what am I overlooking? Thanks! Not much. One important technical detail explains much of what one needs to know about AOL. AOL users using the standard AOL client software at the default settings are seeing the web through what is called a "Proxy Server". A proxy server keeps copies of web pages which AOL users have visited previously, and only updates them if the proxy server thinks it ought to. The default rule, in the absence of specific intstuctions from the Web Server, is that AOL will only re-check a web page when 20% of the lifetime of the page (since the last change) has elapsed. This means if a web page hasn't been changed in two weeks, AOL users may not see any new updates for as much as 3 days after the page is changed. Another "feature" is that all web graphics are compressed into a proprietary format called "ART", which AOL purchased from Johnson-Grace a while back. This compression algorithm seriously degrades the original image, for the benefit of significantly smaller graphics and a perception of faster response time. Information about the above can be found at: webmaster.info.aol.com along with other interesting material about how AOL is able to "do" TCP/IP over its own proprietary protocol (AOL uses "IP Tunneling")

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