Slashdot Mirror
Freecache
TonkaTown writes "Finally the solution for slashdotting, or just the poor man's Akamai? Freecache from the Internet Archive aims to bring easy to use distributed web caching to everyone. If you've a file that you think will be popular, but far too popular for your isp's bandwidth limits, you can just serve it as http://freecache.org/http://your.site/yourfile instead of the traditional http://your.site/yourfile and Freecache will do all the heavy lifting for you. Plus your users get the advantage of swiftly pulling the file from a nearby cache rather than it creeping off your overloaded webserver."
If the referrer is slashdot, return a link to the google cache of your page element, rather than the actual element.
I trust google to be faster than these guys.
on slashdot - lots of times. It only cache's files bigger than 5MB so if someone is slashdotting your MP3 collection it's a boon. If you're jsut hosting a dynamic web page with dynamic images your mysql server is still going to feel the strain.
I should point out that Freecache is in beta mode. By coincidence, this posting on Slashdot here is an interesting way of working out bugs.
This sig no verb.
As their status page explains...
I think they're looking more for serving big files, not html and inline images. Smallest file size is 5mb.
-- Nothing unusual happened today
Information: "I want to be anthropomorphized"
Well, Microsoft created a format that doesn't require tar and zip. .mht files are complete webpages (images and all) bundled up at once so you can deliver them as a single file.
.mht yet, I don't think.
Combining that with bittorrent should be relatively easy.
Of course, you'll probably have to view the result in IE, as the mozilla project hasn't quite worked out
It *is* still in Beta, and it's coming up a lot faster than most /.ed pages.
1. Yes. RTFSummary. It uploads automatically when someone requests the file from them. Just change your link to http://freecache.org/http://oldurl.net.
2. Probably them. The entire internet is largely a pron/warez stash, so I'd expect a lot of the same there.
Of course, you'll probably have to view the result in IE, as the mozilla project hasn't quite worked out .mht yet, I don't think.
.mht is mail html! Is an HTML mail with all the page content in it! Even Netscape 4 can read it!
What??
3. Can users request removal of cached content (something not possible with the Google cache).
Actually, you can request removal of a google cache, but you must have access to the reference source site to do so. Once you've requested removal, there is even a personalized status page where you can check the progress of the removal.
Phoenix
(OT) Aah, but remember, you don't get karma for funny posts. Better wait until next time.
Exercise your right not to vote. thinkoutside.org
Konqueror allows users to save a page and it's dependencies in a Web ARchive. It's pretty much a .tgz file renamed.
Can I say RTFFAQ now? :)
How are they supposed to be making money on this?
It's not a way of making money, it's a way of spending them. It's run by the Internet Archive, founded and funded by Brewster Kahle. It's there for your free enjoyment - revel in the goodness of humanity!
Any sufficiently advanced libertarian utopia is indistinguishable from government.
See Bug 40873 and Bug 18764. Summary is that Thunderbird (mail) lets you view .mht but the browser does not. And there's no way to save .mht with Mozilla.
You'd have to come up with a scheme like:
Yep
The MHT format is specified in RFC 2557, an open standard.... so you can implement your own MHT writer or reader if you like.
The trick with saving a page as an MHT in IE is that if the page includes any frames that are not visible (which are made visible by script that runs when the user clicks on buttons for example), IE appears to not automatically load that content, so the saved page doesn't include it. If you have a complex page, you might need to write code (or use chili kat if it's in your budget) to get an MHT created in the manner you would like.
Now the www.squidserver.com server would have to bear the entirety of the bandwidth usage. That's not at all scalable.
What makes you think that www.squidserver.com always resolves to the same single squid server? Intelligent DNS resolution in conjunction with things like IP multicast and multi-homing could be used to achieve something approaching what Akamai does.
Plus, the advantage of a proper caching HTTP proxy as the "meat" of this solution means that HTTP caching rules are respected. If a site has an advertising graphic that they really need to have loaded for each user and not cached, they can express that through HTTP caching headers and "www.squidproxy.com" would be "required" to pass the request through. This way you neatly side-step the perceived legal problems Slashdot says they face when considering a similar Slashdot cache for linked-to articles. (See the FAQ.)