static.blitzed.org

Tom and others,

As you may know, we are under a bit of pressure now to reduce
bandwidth usage on angora.

A recent audit of the traffic use by myself revealed that approx 60%
of traffic is HTTP and most of the rest is DNS zone transfer (OPM).
While I am working on the OPM side of things myself and have already
made some changes, we could be doing more on the HTTP side.

A quick glance at the analog stats for blitzed.org suggests that
~50% of HTTP traffic by bytes is for static (non-php) content.

What I propose is creating a http://static.blitzed.org.  This vhost
would hold all static content used by any Blitzed site, incuding
cgiirc if possible.  I am talking about images, any plain HTML page,
archive files, CSS and so on.

Because the content is static, it is very easy to serve.  More
people would be willing to host it for us because it needs nothing
special.  They can rsync it from us regularly without us needing
access, and we can add mirrors using our DNS:

static          A       192.168.0.1
                A       192.168.1.1
                A       192.168.2.1
...

It wouldn't matter what webservers they used, maybe they would like
to even use the various kernel-based webservers that some operating
systems have now.  It could also be forcibly set to cache for ages
without much harm.

The way I would initially accomplish this is to set the vhost up on
angora and then immediately move all static files I can find onto
it.  I'd then look at the Blitzed sites and see what breaks and fix
it as I go.  Perhaps other web team members would help here.  I hope
dg would add config to his cgiirc (if it doesn't exist already) to
get all images etc. from another base URL.

What do you think?

Andryan has agreed that AWS could provide the first mirror of this.