HOME 》 The TOFFEE Project :: TOFFEE :: WAN Optimization

TOFFEE-Butterscotch yet another variant of TOFFEE can be used to save and optimize your Home/SOHO Internet/WAN bandwidth. Unlike TOFFEE (and TOFFEE-DataCenter) TOFFEE-Butterscotch is a non peer-to-peer (and asymmetric) network optimization solution. This makes TOFFEE-Butterscotch an ideal tool for all Home and SOHO users.

Here is my second software development update of TOFFEE-Butterscotch. In the previous update (28-Oct-2016) I discussed about the Alerts, etc. Whereas in my first TOFFEE-Butterscotch news update I have introduced about TOFFEE-Butterscotch research, project specifications, use-cases, etc.

Ever since after I launched my new The TOFFEE Project website on 1-May'2016, I can see there is a steep increase in traffic. Soon after the launch when I monitored its Alexa rankings it was reporting about 12 Million or so. But once it is getting more and more traffic the Alexa rankings shot up and now currently it shows around 2 Million (as on 22-July-2016). Alexa is an excellent tool to monitor your overall website global ranking and indirectly its performance. Unlike Google Analytics which is bound one or other way into Google's SEO. Alexa gives you a second opinion about your website's growth.

Here is my home lab monthly power-consumption readings for research. This will help to measure and monitor the overall power usage and assess the power requirements. This will help me in future purchases such as UPS, battery upgrades and so on. And as well remove replace old obsolete hardware with new less power-consuming devices.

Raspberry Pi is often used as a single board computer for applications such as IoT, hobby projects, DIY, education aid, research and prototyping device. But apart from these applications Raspberry Pi can be used for real-world applications such as in making a full-fledged networking devices. Raspberry Pi is a single board ARM based hardware which is why it is also classified as ARM based SoC. Since it is ARM based it is highly efficient, tiny form-factor and lower in power consumption with moderate computational power. This will allow it to work several hours on emergency battery backup power supply such as low-cost domestic UPS and or some renewable energy source, which is a prerequisite for a typical networking device.

Here is the TOFFEE WAN Optimization benchmarks of the TOFFEE version: TOFFEE-1.1.28. This is the current TOFFEE development version till date (2-Jul-2016). This is a HPC TOFFEE variant meant for high-end custom build servers and high-end desktops (i.e High Performance Computing a.k.a HPC). TOFFEE built this way often needs customized kernel compilation and build such as processor specific and hardware specific tune-ups since it is highly CPU intensive (if not offloaded via Hardware Accelerator Cards).

I started TOFFEE-Mocha WAN Emulation software development on 1-June-2016. I took the existing TOFFEE components as a base. Although the TOFFEE-Mocha is entirely an independent fresh Open-Source WAN Emulation solution. Ever since I am in the process of defining and inventing features. So far I come up with the most important feature which is expected to be present in any WAN Emulation software is the packet delay option.

TOFFEE TOFFEE Data-Center is specifically meant for Data Center, Cluster Computing, HPC applications. TOFFEE is built in Linux Kernel core. This makes it inflexible to adapt according to the hardware configuration. It does sequential packet processing and does not scale up well in large multi-core CPU based systems (such as Intel Xeon servers, Core i7 Extreme Desktop systems,etc). Apart from this since it is kernel based, if there is an issue in kernel, it may crash entire system. This becomes a challenge for any carrier grade equipment (CGE) hardware build.