Coral Cache

Pretty nifty thing.

Picture: Currently working Coral Clusters (more maps over here)

If you have a page and are about to be hit by millions of requests (e.g. the slashdot effect), coral cache could be your webservers last solution.

Simply append ".nyud.net:8080"; to the URL (e.g. http://blog.marc-seeger.de.nyud.net:8080) and the distributed coral cache network will "copy"; the page and it will be able to take the load of your server.

From their homepage:

CoralCDN is a decentralized, self-organizing, peer-to-peer web-content distribution network. CoralCDN leverages the aggregate bandwidth of volunteers running the software to absorb and dissipate most of the traffic for web sites using the system. In so doing, CoralCDN replicates content in proportion to the content's popularity, regardless of the publisher's resources—-in effect democratizing content publication.

You might ask yourself "how can this help my server, people will still go directly to my domain!";. The answer can be found in the coral cdn wiki.

you could e.g. use mod_rewrite and use this nifty rule:

RewriteEngine on

RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !^CoralWebPrx

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} !(^|&)coral-no-serve$

RewriteRule ^/images/foo(.*)$ http://foo.bar.nyud.net:8080/images/foo$1 [R,L]

You could also rewrite inline links, such as for images, to have Coralized absolute URLs.