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."

Comments

Or use Google...

[StevenMaurer]

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.

This has been mentioned before

[Albanach]

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.

Beta!

[dacarr]

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.

... execpt

[laursen]

They have been offline for AGES due to abuse ...

As their status page explains...

Re:Not solution to slashdot effect, but still grea

[Anonymous Coward]

I think they're looking more for serving big files, not html and inline images. Smallest file size is 5mb.

Re:Not solution to slashdot effect

[lxdbxr]

Also only works for large files unless this FAQ is out of date:

What files are being served by FreeCache?

FreeCache can only serve files that are on a web site. If the link to a file on that web site goes away, so will the file in the FreeCaches. Also, there is a minimum size requirement. We don't bother with files smaller than 5MB, as the saved bandwidth does not outweight the protocol overhead in those cases.

Re:Alternative solution

[SavingPrivateNawak]

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.

What?? .mht is mail html! Is an HTML mail with all the page content in it! Even Netscape 4 can read it!

Re:Some questions

[Phoenix-kun]

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.

Re:Alternative solution

[hattmoward]

Konqueror allows users to save a page and it's dependencies in a Web ARchive. It's pretty much a .tgz file renamed.

It's a FAQ

[Anonymous Coward]

See: Slashdot should cache pages to prevent the Slashdot Effect!

Can I say RTFFAQ now? :)

Re:Alternative solution

[persaud]

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.

Re:Alternative solution

[Coulson]

The problem is that you don't get any benefit from reduplication. Many pages share the same images; if each file is requested independently, the client can ignore files that are already in the cache. If you have to download a tarball of each page + images, you don't get any savings from images already in cache.

You'd have to come up with a scheme like:

1. send a request + list of files you have from that domain + timestamps [large!]
   
2. server sends diff tarball
   
3. client unzips to cache and displays
   

...or...

1. send request
   
2. server sends single response + list of related files + timestamps
   
3. client diffs with cache, sends back batch request for related files
   
4. server sends back batch tarball
   
5. client unzips to cache and displays