Dalesa - Peer-to-Peer Web Cache
About Dalesa
Dalesa is a Free and Open Source Peer - to - Peer web caching software licensed under GPL - 2 that will improve web performance in your local area network.
Dalesa brings cooperative web caching based on peer - to - peer computing to your desktop. Nodes participating in the network will expose their web caches to the entire system through peer - to - peer web object (document) lookup algorithms. This project focuses on using various group communication technologies such as distributed hash tables and IP multicasting to implement robust document lookup techniques.
The system provides a proxy interface and an API for browsers and other potential user agents. User agents such as web browsers can embed the peer - to - peer lookup algorithm by using the API. However, when changes to the code of the user agent is not allowed or inconvenient the http proxy can be used.
Functionalities
Installing Dalesa is easy and only consists of a few steps and its
functionality can be summarized in several steps.
- Dalesa is installed in user’s computer.
- Dalesa communicates with user’s web browser and other computers
installed with Dalesa - When a user requests for file, Dalesa will search it on other computers
installed with Dalesa. - If the requested file is available in another computer file will be downloaded from there, otherwise it will be taken from the web.
- Steps 3 and 4 only take 5 milliseconds maximum.
Advantages of Dalesa
- Dalesa was designed with small Local Area Networks in mind and can be easily used in a network with a 10Mbps bandwidth facilitating 40 computers. The software can be scaled up for much larger networks with hundreds of nodes with few optimizations. These optimizations were tested using NS2(Network Simulator). Also it is even possible to improve it for Internet scale networks using Distributed Hash Tables (DHT).
- The user interface is user friendly and graphical, and can be used for configuring Dalesa
- Displaying real – time performance of Dalesa cache such as a ratio between number of cache hits and total number of cached files.
Dalesa User Interface
- Menu bar with File, Edit and Help menus
- Search tab opens the search pane shown in the Figure.
- Real time web traffic graphs
- Blue line indicate number of cache objects taken from the local cache
- Green line indicate the number of cache objects taken from peers
- Red line indicate the number of cache objects served to peers
- Ratio between cumulative of all objects cached and objects that has at least one hit (statistics by number of files)
- Ratio between cumulative size of all objects cached and objects that has at least one hit (statistics by size of files)
- Colon separated IP and Port number that Dalesa proxy listens on
Funding
Phase I of Dalesa was funded under the e-society grant from Information Communication Technology Agency (ICTA) Sri Lanka.
Download
Dalesa 1.2.0 is available for both Linux and Windows as source packages and Ubuntu binary packages. Dalesa 1.2.0 brings P2P web caching to windows platforms including XP, Vista and Seven. All three windows versions can use the same installer file given below.
Source Tarballs
Binary Packages
Windows
Linux
Get Involved
User Mailing List
To subscribe: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/dalesa-users
Address: dalesa-users@lists.sourceforge.net
Developer Mailing List
To subscribe: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/dalesa-devel
Address: dalesa-devel@lists.sourceforge.net
Awards and Publications
For a full list of awards, refer the awards page.
The Team
Wathsala Vithanage |
|
Nishanka Sirisena |
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Nuwan R Gunaratne |
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Future of Dalesa
The future of Dalesa lies in its deployments and was designed to be used by schools, Nenasalas (local internet browsing centers) and small government organizations. We hope to create a lasting impact in the rural communities by allowing them easy access to internet through the peer-to-peer web cache.