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

Some questions

[GillBates0]

Definitely not an adequate solution, given it's current condition: slashdotted to hell.

I have a few questions though, which I guess may be answered on the website:

1. Can users submit/upload files to be hosted on their website.

2. Who's responsible for ensuring that it doesn't turn into a pr0n/warez stash?

3. Can users request removal of cached content (something not possible with the Google cache).

Re:Not solution to slashdot effect, but still grea

[dan_sdot]

Yes, but the thing that you are not considering is that probably 75% the slashdot effect is just people looking at the link for about 5 seconds, and then closing the page and moving on the the next story. This means no browsing, meaning that it is not important if the whole page is not up there. And as far as pictures go, I would guess that alot of people click on the link, even though they are not too interested, see the text, and realize that they are _really_ not interested. So they close the page before they even need pictures.

In other words, the important stuff, like the rest of the site and the pictures, will be resources only used on those that really care, while those that don't get to see a flash of the text for a second to get a really general idea.

After all, thats what the slashdot effect is, a whole bunch of people that don't really care that much, but want a quick, 5 second look at it.

This will cause problems

[ACNeal]

I see dreaded pictures from goatse.cx in the future. This will break the nice convenient domain name clues that Slashdot gives us, so we don't accidently do things like that.

put it under the hood

[Doc Ruby]

This use of Freecache is still subject to the actual problem that enables Slashdotting: inadequate scaling planning. Some sites are limited by the cost of effective scaling failover countermeasures, but most are limited by lack of any planning for even potential Slashdotting - this use of Freecache still falls prey to that primary problem. And who can remember to prepend "http://freecache.org/" to their entire domain URL, including their repetitive "http://"?

A better use of Freecache is "under the hood". Make your webserver redirect accesses to your "http://whatever.com/something" to "http://freecache.org/http://whatever.com/somethin g". More sites will be able to plan for that single change to their webserver config, than will be able to plan to distribute the freecache.org compound URL. And it won't depend on users correctly using the compound URL. More sites will get the benefit of the freecache.org service. And when freecache.org disappears, or ceases to be free, switching to a competitor will be as easy as changing the config, rather than redistributing a new URL.

Censored

[jdavidb]

This would be great if my employer didn't restrict access to archive.org as allegedly being in the "sex" category.