LanCache
Saving bandwidth and improving download speeds for LAN parties with a local caching proxy for game updates
Background
LAN Parties are amazing and have been a huge part of my life for over 20 years, but they have a problem, particularly in the UK.
They don’t have much in the way of Internet access; it tends to be much slower than people’s home connections and games are getting with updates that are gigabytes in size.
In the early 2010s, Multiplay in the UK started experimenting with a caching proxy for game updates. It worked, but was difficult to set up and required specific knowledge of how to configure nginx.
The Beginning
In 2016, I decided to write a version of their ‘Steam Cache’ that was deployed in Docker, to make it really easy to set up and use at Epic LAN. I also decided to make it open source so that other LAN parties could use it and it sort of took off crazily.
The project quickly gained some volunteers and we started adding support for more games and making it even easier to deploy.
In 2018, it was featured by Linus Tech Tips which brought a lot of users to the project and it’s just continued to grow.
Publishers
We’ve been able to also get publishers and developers onboard with the project. Valve, Riot and Epic have all added explicit support for LanCache and have been absolutely brilliant in helping us add their games.
The Community
We weren’t quite expecting the amount of support from the LAN gaming community for the project. There’s now a thriving discord community and even some spin-off projects like LanCache Prefill which makes it easy to populate your cache before an event, and some custom dashboards and observability tools.