November 9, 2023
What is a caching server?
A caching server is a dedicated network device that locally saves web pages, software updates or other internet content. In our case, this is an Apple Mini computer deployed at each school. This server is listening to all devices on the schools network and putting frequently requested information in temporary storage. Caching servers both speed up access to data and reduce demand on bandwidth for updates and commonly visited sites by recalling the information from its temporary storage. This saves time and resources as the caching server can pull information from its own storage instead of having to resend the request to the source and wait for a response.
How is the Caching server updated?
The caching servers are managed remotely by the AFNTS network team. Updates are run daily on each caching server around 8:00 am to ensure each device has the newest updates for the day. This is to ensure that school devices will not use all the bandwidth available to the school downloading the same update if triggered all at the same time. The caching server downloads the update first, stores it locally, and then distributes the data to any connected client or device looking for the update.
As a side note, we always recommend running updates for school devices after peak hours to avoid any unwanted network congestion or delays. Peak hours are from 9:00AM - 4:00PM Monday to Friday.
Breakdown of the units deployed at schools, data cached and served in October 2023:
Why is so much data cached?
A large amount of the content cached during the month of October was from Apple IOS and Mac updates. Apple has released many updates in this time to address a number of critical issues. All of the caching servers deployed have all the newest updates loaded locally, so please make sure you update any Apple device if not done so already!
Top 3 servers utilized:
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