Varnish cache

[Kevin Davies <ja...@gmail.com>]

I plan to put a Varnish cache mesh in front of Guacamole. This is for
regional caching of content.

What actually is the nature of the content served by guacamole?
How effective/ineffective would this be given this content?
Is this the best way to achieve my outcomes?

I realise its using HTML5 but the content is made up of what exactly. I
can't seem to find any readable material on this?

I am considering regionally caching content so end users in another country
get improved performance given the latency between them and country in
which guacamole hosted? I have control of hosting in both sites but
commericial wanopt is too expensive so I am looking at alternative
solutions.

- Kevin

Re: Varnish cache

[Mike Jumper <mi...@guac-dev.org>]

You can't cache interactive, dynamic content like a remote desktop session.
The only thing that could be cached with something like Varnish would be
the static JavaScript, images, etc. that make up the client, but in the
grand scheme of things that will have minimal to zero impact on the user
experience within the remote desktop. Once the user has visited Guacamole,
they have the client fully downloaded to browser already.

The caching performed within RDP is bitmap caching. That reduces the amount
of bandwidth consumed by a connection using the same images over and over,
but whether a bitmap should be cached (and the content of that bitmap) is
determined by the RDP server itself.

If you're looking to improve user experience regionally, the best way of
doing so would be to reduce network latency - host multiple Guacamole
servers and such that each user is reasonably guaranteed to have an low
latency connection between themselves and their Guacamole gateway, with the
connection between Guacamole and the remote desktop being over a
predictable, isolated, low latency network.

- Mike


On Wed, Apr 5, 2017 at 4:15 PM, Kevin Davies <ja...@gmail.com> wrote:

> The majority of content is RDP and I know guacamole itself does caching of
> this. Would it be better to have guacd do this job? Can you make a guacd
> (regional) -> guacd (local) chain do the same thing?
>
> On Thu, Apr 6, 2017 at 9:05 AM, Kevin Davies <ja...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> I plan to put a Varnish cache mesh in front of Guacamole. This is for
>> regional caching of content.
>>
>> What actually is the nature of the content served by guacamole?
>> How effective/ineffective would this be given this content?
>> Is this the best way to achieve my outcomes?
>>
>> I realise its using HTML5 but the content is made up of what exactly. I
>> can't seem to find any readable material on this?
>>
>> I am considering regionally caching content so end users in another
>> country get improved performance given the latency between them and country
>> in which guacamole hosted? I have control of hosting in both sites but
>> commericial wanopt is too expensive so I am looking at alternative
>> solutions.
>>
>> - Kevin
>>
>
>

Re: Varnish cache

[Kevin Davies <ja...@gmail.com>]

The majority of content is RDP and I know guacamole itself does caching of
this. Would it be better to have guacd do this job? Can you make a guacd
(regional) -> guacd (local) chain do the same thing?

On Thu, Apr 6, 2017 at 9:05 AM, Kevin Davies <ja...@gmail.com> wrote:

> I plan to put a Varnish cache mesh in front of Guacamole. This is for
> regional caching of content.
>
> What actually is the nature of the content served by guacamole?
> How effective/ineffective would this be given this content?
> Is this the best way to achieve my outcomes?
>
> I realise its using HTML5 but the content is made up of what exactly. I
> can't seem to find any readable material on this?
>
> I am considering regionally caching content so end users in another
> country get improved performance given the latency between them and country
> in which guacamole hosted? I have control of hosting in both sites but
> commericial wanopt is too expensive so I am looking at alternative
> solutions.
>
> - Kevin
>