I think IA is already overloaded as-is. I know it’s hard to keep that insane amount of storage available but it’s still always slow. They probably only have one server location, as opposed to a global CDN like YouTube.
Their goal is to make everything available, not necessarily available quickly; people going to an archive are generally looking for something in particular so a bit of latency doesn’t really affect the majority of valid use cases. They’re not hosting a CDN and they want to discourage people from treating it as such. It also puts off scrapers as I imagine the rate at which you could scrape is slower than the rate at which content is added to the archive
I know. I’m not saying I need it any faster and most people in fact don’t, but as they have no incentive to widen their bandwidth, we can expect outages if they ever make some lawless group angry.
I think IA is already overloaded as-is. I know it’s hard to keep that insane amount of storage available but it’s still always slow. They probably only have one server location, as opposed to a global CDN like YouTube.
I think the slowness is partly by design.
Their goal is to make everything available, not necessarily available quickly; people going to an archive are generally looking for something in particular so a bit of latency doesn’t really affect the majority of valid use cases. They’re not hosting a CDN and they want to discourage people from treating it as such. It also puts off scrapers as I imagine the rate at which you could scrape is slower than the rate at which content is added to the archive
I know. I’m not saying I need it any faster and most people in fact don’t, but as they have no incentive to widen their bandwidth, we can expect outages if they ever make some lawless group angry.
They have several but the main one on the Western hemisphere is an old church in SF.
I think library of Alexandria in Egypt is another location?
Wait… Alexandria… Now Internet Archive is literal Internet Library of Alexandria.