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Freecache

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the building-a-better-mousetrap dept.

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."

4 of 258 comments (clear)

  1. Not solution to slashdot effect, but still great! by attaboy · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Well, it won't be the solution to Slashdotting, as you can't cache a whole site.

    Please note that you cannot submit a whole site to FreeCache as in http://freecache.org/http://www.rocklobsters.com/ This will not work as only index.html will be cached. You have to prefix every item that you want to have cached seperately.

    You can cache an HTML page (index.html) but all the images will pull from the local machine. You could cache each image separately, but the change would have to be made in the site's HTML.

    On the other hand, I don't imagine it would be hard to write some kind of proxy script that grabs the page and changes the HTML to point to freecache SRCs for each image/movie... you could then point to a freecache of that page...

    And of course, this all breaks the second somebody has a site that is heavily CGI based.

    Still, it's a start. I'll be sure to use it if I ever submit any site of my own to Slashdot ;-) Many thanks to the guys at the Internet Archive for setting this up. You rock!


    --
    The facts have a liberal bias. --The Daily Show
  2. Re:Or use Google... by hendridm · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Yeah, that's fine for sites who can expect the possibility of being linked to, but those sites can often handle the load anyway. It those small sites (Geocities) hosted on some guys cable modem describing how he modded his mom's vibrator into a CD player that won't make it. Often times, myself included, these people don't really think about or expect to be linked to.

  3. What we really need.... by Xiadix · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Is a public available squid server. If you put any link through the server such as:

    www.squidserver.com/http://www.doomedsite.com

    The public squid will cache a copy of it. On the first access (like when the approver looks at it) It should look at a request and see if it has a recent cache. If it does feed that, if not get the newest copy and promth the user for a refresh or automatically refresh after a set time (5 sec). It will update its cache as the site does. All without having to upload anything. After a few days when nobody is utilizing the cache, it can purge it. Waiting for the next doomed site.

    DISCLAIMER: The may be how Freecache works, but I can't get to it
    1) because I am at work.
    2) as the comments suggest it is slashdotted.

    KevG

  4. Why is this a problem? by RAMMS+EIN · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I wonder why this continues to be a problem. It should be obvious to any judge that a hosting provider cannot and should not check everything that is uploaded to their servers.

    It may be reasonable to expect them to pull content that is illegal where they are located, but that should be a simple matter of notifying them, they pull the content, no harm done. They may even be required to disclose the identity of the uploader, after which this person can be prosecuted.

    I don't think anything in this scenario is outrageous or unfeasible. What is outrageous and infeasible is holding the host responsible for what the user uploaded. Then why is this the way it happens all too often?

    --
    Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.