Torrential web

The technology behind BitTorrent could solve a huge number of bandwidth woes — and help the web more easily route around damage. We’ve all seen the Slashdot effect take down websites, even when they’re just serving static content. Why should this happen, when possibly thousands of people, many with bandwidth to spare, already have that content sitting in their browser’s cache?

BitTorrent solves the bandwidth problem by distributing downloads across many hosts. Instead of ten people downloading one file from one server, the ten people all download bits of the file from the server, then share their bits with each other until everyone has the entire file.

Integrating BitTorrent-like functionality into browser caches and webservers and using custom HTTP headers on the server side to indicate what content is static and public (can be shared) versus dynamic or private (shouldn’t be shared) would allow everyone viewing a particular resource, such as a web page, to get the page and its included files from other people who’ve viewed it recently, not just the server it’s hosted on.

The Freenet Project sort of solves this problem, as every freenet node helps replicate some of the entire network’s data based on popularity, making frequently-requested data easier for everyone to reach. However, despite years of development, Freenet is still far out of reach of most casual web users. Integrating this functionality invisibly into a popular open-source browser and a popular open-source webserver would be a much stronger step toward solving this problem.