W3C Gets Excessive DTD Traffic

eldavojohn writes "It's a common string you see at the start of an HTML document, a URI declaring the type of document, but that is often processed causing undue traffic to W3C's site. There's a somewhat humorous post today from W3.org that seems to be a cry for sanity and asking developers and people to stop building systems that automatically query this information. From their post, 'In particular, software does not usually need to fetch these resources, and certainly does not need to fetch the same one over and over! Yet we receive a surprisingly large number of requests for such resources: up to 130 million requests per day, with periods of sustained bandwidth usage of 350Mbps, for resources that haven't changed in years. The vast majority of these requests are from systems that are processing various types of markup (HTML, XML, XSLT, SVG) and in the process doing something like validating against a DTD or schema. Handling all these requests costs us considerably: servers, bandwidth and human time spent analyzing traffic patterns and devising methods to limit or block excessive new request patterns. We would much rather use these assets elsewhere, for example improving the software and services needed by W3C and the Web Community.' Stop the insanity!"

Comments

The Solution

[OdieWan]

I have a solution to the problem; I wrote it down at http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd !

Re:The Solution

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't click that link! It's some sort of ascii pornography!

Do what....

[Creepy Crawler]

Do what any other respectable web provider would do..

Put links to Goatse in the definitions!

Simple solution

[mcrbids]

The answer to this problem is quite easy.

Continue to host the data referenced on a single T-1 line. That will cut your expenses to the bone since you'll never exceed 1.54 Mbps and that should be quite cheap. And, any dumfuxorz who fubarred their parser to not cache these basically static values will probably figure it out... very quickly.

You don't have to leave it on the T-1, maybe just 1 month out of the year. Every year.

Problem solved!

Such an easy solution

[mwasham]

And it is only 4 articles down.. Host with Yahoo! Yahoo Offers All-You-Can-Eat Storage and Bandwidth http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/02/08/1811236

Submitted this to /.?

[dotancohen]

Great, they cry "we get too much traffic", so we go ahead and slap them on the front page of slashdot. Sick, sick fucking joke.

Starting on the 1st, fool

[Scrameustache]

You don't have to leave it on the T-1, maybe just 1 month out of the year. Every year. I suggest April! :D