Coral is a seamless transparent system for distributing HTTP traffic over a set of web cache proxies to reduce bandwidth demand on a central resource.
What? What the hell does that mean?
Stops your server going down under the weight of a Slashdotting, dude.
Really? That’s cool. How does that work, then?
Easy. Take the URL that you want to not get Slashdotted: let’s say it’s http://www.example.com/something/cool. Then add nyud.net:8090 at the end of the hostname, like so: http://www.example.com.nyud.net:8090/something/cool. That’s the URL you give to people. Now, when someone requests it, the content at that URL will get transparently given to them from one of Coral’s many caches, instead of from your server.
Neatness! How many caches are there?
This is unclear. The website makes reference to people running Coral caches, but doesn’t seem to say whether anyone is actually doing so.
Nonetheless, that’s smart. Hey, I’ve got an idea! Why not use this for LugRadio?
I was just thinking about that. Of course, we already have the mirror network. Moreover, Coral won’t let you serve files more than 50MB: LR shows aren’t that big, but they might reduce it still further. It’s a pretty cool idea, though. It would be most handy if Slashdot themselves Coralized the URLs they post, which would stop anyone getting Slashdotted (or would help, at least).
Ooh, good idea? Do you think they’ll do that?
Hell, no. But it would be good. Would have saved my website when I got slashdotted, for example.
On I wrote Coralizing the web, on the subject of Uncategorized.
ssta
Mark IJbema
iirc archive.org does the same thing, but then for big files :) Don’t know how well it works and what the status of that service currently is though.
sil
I do pay for decent hosting, now. Back then, I was getting an (excellent) service provided by a friend of mine, but it wasn’t on a very high-bandwidth connection.
Not that I am going to deny that I am cheap :)
ssta
Just pondering…how does a man go about getting slashdotted? I suspect that shanta would hold up fine. It has 100Mbit to the world (hopefully soon to be GBit) and bandwidth to burn (I use about 5% of the very generous bandwidth allowance now). Slashdorkers eating up 30G of throughput wouldn’t bother me, 100G might start to concern me a little I guess. Be interesting to see if it could handle it. I’m guessing it would depend if the content was static or dynamic…some of the dynamic stuff I serve is quite resource hungry I guess. Our wiki,a tikiwiki is very nice, but it’s not what I’d call lean or fast.
The main drain on shanta resources right now is mail. Some fucktard decides to use an email address that goes via shanta in a forged header and spams a few billion addresses, the bounces can be a severe problem since everything gets virus and spam filtered. Would anyone mind if I declared a fatwa(sp?) against all spammers?
By the way Aq! When you come looking for a man on IRC, hang around for more than 15 seconds will you? It might even take me five minutes to notice you! :)
Nick
Hi all,
My pictures and videos are horribly slow to download so I’m considering coralizing the links (i.e. incorportating .nyud.net.8090 into the link addresses. So I have 2 questions about coralizing:
2. Am I right to think that the downloads of coralized files will get faster as more and more people access them and they get into more of the Coral caches?
3. If I use coralized links, might this negatively affect my chances of building a better Google ranking? I worry that coralized links don’t really point to the site itself and that more people might hotlink to the coralized material and bypass the site completely. Hotlinking is disabled on my whole site.
sil
Nick:
(not sure why your questions start at (2), but OK)
2. Not sure. I didn’t find too much info about how the Coral thing works. If they’re caching the data, then presumably yes. If they’re doing a P2P bittorrent-esque thing, no.
3. If you’re only linking images and videos, then I doubt it will have any effect: Google only really reads text. People may link directly to the material, true, and that might have an effect, but you can’t stop people doing that…
That’s just because you’re a cheap bastard. If you paid for decent hosting you wouldn’t care if you got slashdotted. :)