Chg-FREEnet (Network of Scientific Center in Chernogolovka of Russian Academy of Sciences) is one of regional networks constituting FREEnet. It was established in 1993 and it connects now 12 Institutions of RAS in Chernogolovka (16 class C networks). The core of Chg-FREEnet is a fiber optic ethernet backbone (total length is more than 6 km), some institutions are connected by analog leased lines (19.2-57.6 kbps), the mean distance between institutions is about 1500 m. Chernogolovka is situated at 50 km from Moscow and is connected with Moscow by analog leased line (about 70 km, 19200 bps) wich is a bottleneck of our networking. Total amount of information transmitted from Moscow to Chernogolovka is about 150 MB per day and from Chernogolovka to Moscow - about 60-80 Mb per day, e.g. channel works at full load. And such situation is typical for Russia.
We began take some steps to reduce our external traffic sumultaneously with developing internal network infrastructure. First of all, to reduce FTP traffic we installed regional ftp-server which has now about 11 GB of most frequently asked information. Firstly in FREEnet we have installed Web caching server. In the begining (November, 1995) it was CERN HTTP daemon, later - Harvest cached v. 1.3 (December, 1995) and v. 1.4 (January, 1996). In August,1996 it was replaced by Squid. Some usage statistics for 9 months (including startup period and summer vacations): 30 requests per hour, 7 MB per day, %hit = 40%, for the last day - 155 requests per hour, 23 MB per day, %hit = 41% for HTTP, and 71% for FTP. About half of requests (by number and by volume) are requests to local servers, and another half is to servers outside Chernogolovka.
Later caching servers was also installed in other FREEnet regional networks - Perm (March, 1996), Yaroslavl, and Chelyabinsk (August, 1996). In September, 1996 the first FREEnet caching server was installed in Moscow at Landau Institute for Theoretical Physics, and peering as neighbors with proxy.isf.ru (International Science Foundation / Space Science - NASA network) was established. This server is also parent for Chernogolovka and some other regional cache servers (Chelyabinsk, Perm). The server serves about 1200 requests per hour, 16 MB per day, %hit = 20%. Less then one week ago another FREEnet cache server (webcache.free.net) was installed in FREEnet NOC. It is planned to be the main FREEnet caching server but needs some investment for this.
Future plans are to connect Yaroslavl and other regional cache server to this infrastructure, establish neighbor relations with caching servers from another networks in Russia, and establish relations with caching servers in other countries.