Coral P2P Cache Enters Public Beta

Eloquence writes "infoAnarchy reports that Coral, a peer-to-peer webcaching system, has gone into public beta. Currently the Coral node network is hosted on Planet-Lab, a large scale distributed research network of 400 servers. You can use Coral right now by appending "nyud.net:8090" to a hostname. View Slashdot through Coral. Is this the end of the Slashdot effect?"

Comments

Not too good for websites

[chrispyman]

While their system would be pretty good (supposing it can withstand a slashdotting) for cacheing large files, it's not very useful for websites. Websites usually have lots of additional images, links, and whatnot, and as is currently, the system doesn't rewrite URLs.

Re:Is it possible to combine this with bittorrent

[sploo22]

The whole point of a tracker is that it's updated constantly with which chunks each person has available. A cache, by definition, doesn't interact with the original site so you couldn't send your own information. Nobody would know to download chunks from you, and therefore their software would be less likely to send you chunks.

You could conceivably design a distributed tracker, but this isn't it. Anyway, there would doubtless be synchronization issues that would greatly decrease the network's overall performance.