video swarming method

April 7, 2005 9:54 AM

I have seen Mefites use a link prefix of some kind in front of linked video files (I think the prefix was related to a university, but memory fails) which allowed the video to be served in a swarming fashion to reduce the load on the original server. Does anyone here know that method?
posted by planetkyoto to Computers & Internet (9 answers total)

Bittorrent?
posted by rfordh at 9:56 AM on April 7, 2005

Best answer: Sounds more like Coral cache.
posted by MikeKD at 10:05 AM on April 7, 2005

Best answer: key point: append .nyud.net:8090 to the host name, ie, for MeFi: http://www.metafilter.com.nyud.net:8090/
posted by MikeKD at 10:09 AM on April 7, 2005

Response by poster: That's exactly it, MikeKD. Thanks.
posted by planetkyoto at 10:09 AM on April 7, 2005

I don't get it. Why would someone do this? It seems like just a slower version of MeFi when I go to http://www.metafilter.com.nyud.net:8090/ - does it automatically get cached there or something to make it quicker for others?
posted by pwb503 at 11:23 AM on April 7, 2005

Having just read through part of the FAQ, I'll take a stab. coral cache is designed mostly for large static files...like hosting a video clip for example. Something like the metafilter front page isn't a good example because coral cache has a 5-minute refresh minimum. For metafilter it looks like the cache hasn't been refreshed for almost 2 hours right now.

but in theory the coral cached version should load up faster if the real metafilter server was straining...I didn't really see any difference between the 2 right now.
posted by jacobsee at 11:28 AM on April 7, 2005

I think media files, rather than whole sites, is where the real potential lies, even though they use CNN as an example (wonder what Coral would have done for the world on Sept. 11?). I use "coralized" links for my podcast, so the original file on my site only gets hit a few dozen times despite having a lot more folks looking for it.
posted by pzarquon at 1:06 PM on April 7, 2005

Slashdot users often add this to sites linked on /. since the coral servers are much more robust than you average Joe's, and are much less likely to go down from the strain of millions of geeks pouring in at the same time.
posted by o2b at 2:24 PM on April 7, 2005

Note that linking to a containing HTML page does not coralize any embedded media files. You can't link to CNN.com and have Coral links magically appear for any other files or articles it links to.

You can only provide a direct link to a specific large media file, and then only up to 50Mb.
posted by dhartung at 9:40 PM on April 7, 2005