Wildebeest was a peer-to-peer distributed web cache, built in Java on top of ZeroC ICE middleware.
The problem it aimed to solve was the Slashdot effect: before cloud hosting, a self-hosted project featured on Slashdot’s front page would routinely go down or exhaust its bandwidth within hours. The idea was that participating users could share their locally-cached copy of a site through a distributed proxy, so availability would scale with popularity rather than being bottlenecked by a single host.
The project reached proof-of-concept stage - a working proxy server that could serve cached resources from other nodes in the network, with the benchmark being successfully loading the Gmail web interface through it. It never had users and wasn’t promoted.
The problem went away as cheap cloud hosting (S3 and friends) became ubiquitous, and as static site generators replaced the single-instance PHP setups that struggled to handle traffic spikes. Source code is on SourceForge.
Wildebeest was a precursor to Kevalin, which revisits the idea of a peer-to-peer content network but addresses a more general problem: decentralised content distribution rather than caching centralised content.
