Freecache

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Posted by ryuzaki0 on Wednesday May 12, 2004 @05:33AM 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."

8 of 258 comments (clear)

Putting freecache to the test by Rosco+P.+Coltrane · 2004-05-12 05:36 · Score: 5, Funny

http://freecache.org/http://your.site/yourfile

http://freecache.org/http://freecache.org/http://f reecache.org

seems to piss it off slightly. I wonder why...

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"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Beta! by dacarr · 2004-05-12 05:41 · Score: 5, Informative

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.

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This sig no verb.
... execpt by laursen · 2004-05-12 05:42 · Score: 5, Informative

They have been offline for AGES due to abuse ...
As their status page explains...
This will cause problems by ACNeal · 2004-05-12 05:44 · Score: 5, Interesting

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.
Re:Not solution to slashdot effect, but still grea by Anonymous Coward · 2004-05-12 05:44 · Score: 5, Informative

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 by lxdbxr · 2004-05-12 05:47 · Score: 5, Informative

Also only works for large files unless this FAQ is out of date: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

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-- Nothing unusual happened today
What we really need.... by Xiadix · 2004-05-12 06:00 · 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
Re:Alternative solution by persaud · 2004-05-12 07:14 · Score: 5, Informative

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.