Does tunnelling firefox through a compressed ssh tunnel make sense?

[JonJ678]

Hey. This idea seems fairly solid now, but I thought I'd see what people make of it.

Say you have one computer connected to standard wired broadband, and one wireless. You wish to reduce the bandwidth the wireless one uses because you're considering mobile broadband for it. I think it is sensible to have the laptop send dns lookups and data requests from firefox through a compressed ssh tunnel to the desktop, which finds it online, compresses it, and sends it back down the tunnel.

This will hopefully reduce the bandwidth used, at the cost of slightly higher latency. Is the idea sound? I've set the laptop up doing this but haven't worked out how to test the change in bandwidth it yet. Using Ubuntu.

Worth doing this?

 

[deadite66]

have you considered running your own squid cache?

mine from january, calamaris stats

Cache statistics                                                                
--------------------------------------------------------- -------------- ------ 
Total amount cached:                                            requests 306234 
Request hit rate:                                                      %  62.37 
Bandwidth savings:                                                  Byte  1637M 
Bandwidth savings in Percent (Byte hit rate):                          %   6.97

as you can see you can make quite a saving