Web Caches

I have been surprisingly busy this week, considering that I have been on vacation the last couple days. Anyway, to keep everyone interested, how about a quick post on web caches:

Some of you might have noticed that certain websites tend to slow down after they have been linked to by a large news site or mailing list. This is simply caused by the huge load put on a server as many people try to connect at once.

One popular solution is the Coral Cache Service. All you have to do is append ".nyud.net:8080" (without the quotes) to the server section of the URL. (after the top level domain identifier, so www.site.com would become www.site.com.nyud.net:880). As soon as one person views a site through Coral Cache, it is in the "cached" so that others can view it quickly, through Coral Cache, without putting much, if any, stress on the server hosting the content. If you run a high traffic site, then you may want to link other, smaller sites, in this manner. This is particularly good if you are linking a free geocities or similar account that has a very small bandwidth quota.

If you are hosting a file, or trying to download one from a slow server, Dijjer works much the same as Coral Cache, only for files. It works through a background service, that fetches files and provides bandwidth back to the rest of the network. There is also a firefox extension to help in downloading things through Dijjer. For more information, it might be best to visit the Dijjer website.

Neither service is very useful generally, but If you have a use, they are both worth a look. Hopefully I will have some more time to post here soon, but for now, Go enjoy the nice spring weather (here in the North Eastern US anyway), and thanks for all the feedback.