Raphael Manfredi wrote: > This vserver is of course running a Gnutella Web Cache, one of the most > efficient web caches on Earth, developped by Christian Biere, also known > for his work on gtk-gnutella.
As an alternative you can run your own Gnutella Web Cache. The newest Crab
0.9.1 can be found at here:
http://ghostwhitecrab.com/crab/
However, keep in mind that there's a reason it hasn't reached version 1.0
yet. I don't claim that it's super-efficient or super-whatever. It's seem
to work quite well, that's all I can say. Also it's not quite as user-friendly
(nor tested) as Gtk-Gnutella. Thus, I don't recommend it to less experienced
Unix users. In any case, feel free to look at it or test it. It is provided
under a BSD/MIT-like license and hopefully very portable among operating
systems compliant to POSIX. Even if you don't want to use it, it would be great
if people with more exotic system than Linux/x86 could tell me whether it
compiles on their systems.
The current request rates that have to be handled by GWebCaches are pretty
high i.e., over 60,000 requests per hour at rush hours if the GWebCache is
well-known and popular. If you add the TCP overhead, this adds up to about 50
Gigabyte per month. This was caused due to the massive decrease of well
working GWebCaches. We're now down to about 20 (or even less if you consider
that some of them are not working very well). The low number of GWebCaches
also means that the whole system is much more sensitive to denial-of-service
attacks (not that I'm asking for any).
This might sound a little scary but consider that a GWebCache doesn't
sky-rocket from zero 50,000 requests per hour. You'll start at about 1,000 and
then approach several thousand per hour after a week. If you use a DynDNS.org
hostname with dynamic (not static) DNS, peers will disappear almost instantly
(the DNS TTL is only 1 minute). LimeWire peers are a little stubborn due to a
severe DNS-related bug in Sun's Java VM. That's not threatening though. So if
you have a flatrate and read Crab's documentation, you could give it a try for
a few hours or days. The crucial point is to use a dedicated hostname so that
you can pull the plug at any time without any side-effects. In the past many
people just used their normal website to run a GWebCache so that they had to
take down their complete website to get rid of requests by stupid clients once
and for all.
If you wonder what kind of machine you need: A 486 DX-100 with 32 MB RAM (or
something similar fast/slow) should be completely sufficient. Crab uses
typically 2 MB memory and at most 30% CPU time on such a machine, the memory
usage might increase up to 3-5 MB in bad cases. There's virtually no disk-io
except for log files. The only part that might get stressed is the TCP/IP stack
of your machine.
Last but not least, if you decide to run Crab for a while, send me a mail,
please so that I able to inform you in case I discover any serious bugs.
--
Christian
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