Google Announces Google CDN

leetrout writes "Google has introduced their Page Speed Service which 'is the latest tool in Google's arsenal to help speed up the web. When you sign up and point your site's DNS entry to Google, they'll enable the tool which will fetch your content from your servers, rewrite your webpages, and serve them up from Google's own servers around the world.'"

Comments

But what about non-static pages?

[Crudely_Indecent]

So, it rewrites my HTML, but what about my PHP (Perl, Python, your_scripting_language_here)?

Re:But what about non-static pages?

[serviscope_minor]

Not much of the web is static these days.

Actually, almost all of it is, still.

Images: static. Videos: static. Big blob of CSS downloaded with the page: static. Big blob of javascript downloaded by the page: also static. Sure, there is some non-static HTML, but the job of that is to arrange a bunch of much larger static objects things on a page.

Re:And insert ads

[DigiShaman]

Maybe. If you don't plan on paying or shit, why not? OTOH you pay a small fee to opt out of ads, that would be ok too.

When someone offers a "free" service, it's not really free. Almost always there is a hidden catch of some sort. This idea. This mentality that everything in the world should be free with no strings attached is ludicrous. Either you read and accept the TOS, or you don't.

Re:No surpises here really

[outsider007]

Speed should be a ranking factor. They still need to demonstrate better latency than competing CDNs if they want my business.

Re:Holy shit

[Em Ellel]

Holy shit, 6 out of 7 respondents to the GP (all but anredo) completely missed the point. [insert standard complaint about slashdot going downhill].

Web pages with script are not static, and caching the HTML script output does nothing. Server-side code generally has to be run per-visitor. Akamai has all sorts of crazy custom XML to specify which portions are static.

Setting up a proper CDN for the modern web is more complicated than just redirecting some DNS entries.

LOL. Talk about pot calling kettle black. This is what happens when you read the slashdot summary instead of the source material. Allow me to explain what you are missing - what Google is doing is not a CDN at all, its just a bad summary. They are providing an optimizing proxy - it could care less if your content is static or dynamic, as long as it generates HTML output, it will work. It is unclear from first glance if the proxy is a caching proxy - I would guess it is - but even then it would be a stretch to call it a CDN in a modern sense of the word.

Akamai? Inktomi?

[IGnatius T Foobar]

Funny how all of the slashdotters are talking about privacy issues instead of this service's potential to disrupt the paid CDN industry. I wonder what Akamai thinks about this development? Or the folks at Inktomi (now part of Yahoo, I believe) for that matter?