Apple Content Cache Reverse Engineered | Hacker News Reader

Apple Content Cache Reverse Engineered

github.com

27 pointskaendfinger8 comments

The new "Content Caching" option in System Preferences is news to me. Probably a good feature if you have multiple identical iOS devices. I wonder how much sharing there is between different models, or even iPhone vs iPad.

Quite a bit. iOS is pretty modular(as are individual apps), but there is a lot of overlap.

Can someone explain the use case of this for me?

I read the site, but still don’t get the purpose of it (obviously I get the technical challenge).

Run a guest network on Wifi? App updates, system updates and iCloud traffic can suck up an inordinate amount of bandwidth. Instead of blocking it if you run content caching you can efficiently serve your users.

Heck if you have more than a handful of Mac's/iOS devices at home even, content cache can make a huge difference, especially when new versions or major updates to OS's are released. It also caches iCloud data so if you use iCloud Drive and/or photos on multiple devices it can also dramatically cut down the amount of traffic between your network and Apple's servers. It's pretty neat and great that Apple moved it from OSX Server into the regular OS (sharing pref pane as noted). This would be better still for sites with large guest networks and not having to have a Mac just to run the content cache.

Apple device household, a Mac Mini running just this made a massive difference around OS release times when every app on every device is frantically getting updated as bugs are squashed.

That's all it takes is running a mac mini - like just sitting on your network and not personally having to do anything??

Crap - I need to look at this more closely!

Apple supported content caching has been around for a number of years now, I'm surprised people are just starting to hear about it. I would call content caching handy for a majority of people, and a must have for anything larger than a small business.

I administer a school of 2000 students and 300 staff with a strong BYO device program. Our curriculum is almost completely online, and officially we only offer support to iPads. Our uptake has been so successful that between student-owned and school-owned class sets that 1600 iPads total have access to our network.

Picture in your mind if you will, what 1600 iPads all downloading a 6 GB iOS update over a 150 Mbit (~19 MBytes/sec) link at once might do to a network. Now compare that to a gigabit (125 MByte/sec) link to our Mac Pro and 9.6 TByte saving in internet quota.

Awesome - this will be really popular with service providers that support businesses that have large guest networks.

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