9 ms·

MathJax CDN shutting down on April 30, 2017

151 points by JohnHammersley 10y ago

zerop 10y ago
Lots of products become popular when they are actually announced here as shutting down :)
joshmn 10y ago
So, yeah, ugh, why would a niche library (in the sense that it's not jQuery or YUI) need to operate its own CDN, for anything other than style points? There are major players who are already doing this who own and operate their own network (see MaxCDN). What's wrong with just plugging into their existing infrastructure? If that fails, I'd give a shout to FDCServers or LeaseWeb (or of that capacity) and see what they can do. I know of a handful of people who've moved 100TB monthly for less than $100/month, just because they asked.
- stablemap 10y ago
  Was this the case in 2011 when MathJax began offering this? I don't know the answer.
  - joshmn 10y ago
    In 2011 were they piping 70TB?
- taspeotis 10y ago
  You say "niche" but... > 179 Million monthly users and 70TB traffic last month
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- buu700 10y ago
  Why is this downvoted? Nitpicking of the phrase "niche library" aside, I'm having trouble understanding this without more context as well. The post starts: > Our CDN has been an important part of MathJax’s history. When MathJax made its first public release in 2010, hosting a library like MathJax was a complex challenge. The CDN launched a year later and helped resolve this difficulty What is "like MathJax" alluding to? Standing up a web host to serve a single JS file sounds like the opposite of a "complex challenge", so there must be something else going on here. After reading further down, I see that the post does mention that "A common concern with local installations is the size of a complete copy of MathJax, in particular the ~29,000 PNGs", so I guess that's what they're talking about? If so, the comments at the top make more sense and their having had their own CDN at all is more understandable in that light, but it seems needlessly confusing not to lead with that explanation.
  - joshmn 10y ago
    Your guess is as good as mine. I edited my original post to reflect my subjectiveness of niche. I guess my point was that... Okay, so they took advantage of CloudFlare. Great, plenty of people do that, but not on the scale of 10s of TBs. What plan were they on with CF? The $20/month one? If I was a provider, I wouldn't want someone moving that volume of data through my pipes for $20/month (but as a developer, I'd love it) They mentioned how Google provided free storage. Storage is so cheap! Providers make their money on bandwidth. Having said, I can't imagine what kind of price they paid for bandwidth. Like I alluded to in my (now edited) original post: Guys, it never hurts to do your research in the hosting space and learn that there is more to hosting than just AWS/Google/Azure/Heroku/OVH/DigitalOcean/Vultr. Go to webhostingtalk.com, learn a bit, browse the offers forums, write some emails, compare providers, ask questions. Hosting isn't complicated, especially compared to some of the problems you're/we're solving.
    - lrem 10y ago
      Let's say you don't care about DDOS protection and can live with 0.1x the number of PoPs. How much does it cost these days to host these terabytes/month from ≥10 well spread locations?
infinity0 10y ago
> We recommend cdnjs which uses CloudFlare for delivery Oh man, so close to > We recommend cjdns (which is against everything CloudFlare stands for) for delivery
- thomasfoster96 10y ago
  > which is against everything CloudFlare stands for Could you explain this? Have I missed some big Cloudflare news?
  - geofft 10y ago
    For context, cjdns appears to be a routing suite for implementing a darknet overlay over the normal internet. I'm not entirely sure what Cloudflare is perceived to stand for, but it is a strongly centralized service and cjdns appears to be going for decentralization. (But I'd imagine a Cloudflare-like service, including centralized management = economies of scale in sysadminning, would still be valuable in a cjdns darknet.) See https://github.com/cjdelisle/cjdns https://github.com/cjdelisle/cjdns , https://hyperboria.net/ https://hyperboria.net/ , and https://www.reddit.com/r/darknetplan/ https://www.reddit.com/r/darknetplan/
  - yclept 10y ago
    cjdns is a different thing from cdnjs
    - thomasfoster96 10y ago
      Thanks, I thought it was a typo.
nikdaheratik 10y ago
It's kind of strange to think that you need fewer of your own server resources the more successful your software is at meeting its goals, but this seems to be one of those cases.
pacaro 10y ago
I just noticed this last week. I was trying to work out how to use MathJax directly from within JS to render math inline with rendering the rest of my content, rather than asynchronously after the fact. I love MathJax, but I'm now rendering math on the server using a latex -> dvisvgm pipeline and caching the results
- jnetterf 10y ago
  Depending on your use case, KaTeX [1] may be worth a look. It has a "renderToString" function that returns an HTML string. [1] https://khan.github.io/KaTeX https://khan.github.io/KaTeX
  - The_suffocated 10y ago
    One problem of KaTeX is that its feature set is too small. It doesn't even support some very basic commands such as \overrightarrow.
elcct 10y ago
You can get that traffic for cheap from online.net or ovh
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
tyingq 10y ago
Interesting that the solution doesn't change the problem at all. As far as I can tell, cdnjs doesn't pay Cloudflare either. So all the traffic still flows through Cloudflare, unpaid. Cloudflare is listed as a sponsor for cdnjs. Guess it just keeps the list of who CF subsidizes shorter.
- zzzcpan 10y ago
  Cdnjs advertises Cloudflare to developers in its url, it's a significant difference.
- btown 10y ago
  Realistically, many legacy sites using this for rendering will just break and stay broken. Academic upload-and-forget posts, etc. Users may be unhappy but the overall volume of requests could drop. Additionally, every sponsorship may have a fixed cost to someone in the organization, some manager who would rather read a 20 line vs. 100 line report. And I doubt mathematicians and physicists drive the CF bottom line. Generosity has its limits.
  - jmts 10y ago
    I thought the same thing regarding legacy sites. My workplace blocks file sharing and image hosting websites, so I've been acutely aware of the impact to UX recently when domains disappear. I can be almost certain now that when there are no images on a blog or stackoverflow post that they were hosted on imgur. I've been considering this for a while but it seems somewhat curious to me that not so long ago hotlinking was a big no-no and as sites disappeared broken image icons on small websites multiplied, and now we have an increasing number of CDNs where hotlinking is essentially the intended usage.
    - Dylan16807 10y ago
      Have you asked what the justification is for allowing general internet sites but not image hosting sites? I can't imagine it's at all reasonable.
aplaice 10y ago
Will the developers of Chromium and Edge perhaps reconsider incorporating native support for MathML in light of this, considering that apparently people do use maths on the web? 180 million monthly users is a significant portion of the world's population. I'm not sure to what extent MathJax is cached, so it's possible that these are not 180 million unique users. On the other hand, this does not include all those self-hosting MathJax, using KaTeX or just using server-generated images (for example Wikipedia†). †It's possible to force Wikipedia to use native MathML (which, at least on Firefox, looks really nice) or MathJax, but it's non-trivial. https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=6606 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=6606 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=152430 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=152430 https://wpdev.uservoice.com/forums/257854-microsoft-edge-developer/suggestions/6508572-mathml https://wpdev.uservoice.com/forums/257854-microsoft-edge-dev...
- askvictor 10y ago
  Yeah; I'm quite surprised, particularly given both Google's and Microsoft's push into the education market, that there is still not solution for this. MS certain has the edge (pardon the pun) with its maths tools in Word and Onenote, but lacking on the web. And that Google has given absolutely no consideration to this with Docs/Drive and related tools means that my school can't switch exclusively to G-Suite, and need to keep MS tools (and have to deal with installations and licensing) around.
- chr1 10y ago
  People use math, but they use it with Latex not MathML, MathML is too verbose, so even if browsers implemented it people would need libraries like MathJax.
  - runarberg 10y ago
    Nothing is stopping you from authoring your math however you like as long as there are tools that support the translation[1]: [1]: http://fred-wang.github.io/TeXZilla/ http://fred-wang.github.io/TeXZilla/
  - 10y ago
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
mp3geek 10y ago
I thought cloudflare didn't have a data cap? I'm somewhat concerned.
- tyingq 10y ago
  See https://www.cloudflare.com/terms https://www.cloudflare.com/terms Specifically, SECTION 10: LIMITATION ON NON-HTML CACHING.
jnpatel 10y ago
Is there a way in which MathJax could redirect their cdn.mathjax.org to cdnjs.cloudflare.com and maintain backwards compatibility for existing sites? A DNS redirect would break the SSL, right? Perhaps a HTTP 3xx redirect?
- bhouston 10y ago
  HTTP 3xx would work fine, but you would need an active server there. But really setting up nginx with such rules as basically the only thing it is doing to handle these requests on OVH or some other fairly unlimited bandwidth server shouldn't be too hard.
- jgrahamc 10y ago
  Yes.
Hydraulix989 10y ago
I have an old web site hosted by my university that has several math equations on it using MathJax. Unfortunately, since graduating, I no longer have access to it, but my professor still hosts all of past students' content for us. I'm just glad that I had the foresight to have hosted my own copy of that library.
kevin_thibedeau 10y ago
Is there any way to make Sphinx use its own copy of the script rather than the CDN?
slackoverflower 10y ago
I read that as MaxCDN shutting down.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
lpage 10y ago
I switched from MathJax to a middleman + execjs + KaTeX pipeline for my static sites earlier this year, and I'm very happy with it overall. KaTeX isn't 1-1 with MathJax when it comes to syntax support; I was surprised to see that underset and overset - which are ubiquitous - aren't supported. That said, I was able to work around every issue with alternative syntax. It's awesome that the heavy lifting is no longer client side, and it's a significantly easier build pipeline than MathJax if you're trying to generate a single minimized script or use webpack.
- rahimnathwani 10y ago
  Is there a reason why ebooks don't use KaTeX? I subscribe to safaribooksonline.com, which presents HTML versions of ebooks. I think they're just unpackaged versions of epub or mobi versions. Anyway, I'm surprised that equations are generally embedded in images, even in recent (published this month) O'Reilly-published books. Is there some technical reason why authors/publishers do it this way, or is it just about tooling? Gitbook claims that it works: https://www.gitbook.com/blog/features/katex https://www.gitbook.com/blog/features/katex
franciscop 10y ago
What a huge mess. - Only 1 month to re-route 70TB of content. I wonder if even over 10% will be re-routed, with all the other sites broken. - Cloudflare notice could have beem some months in. Hopefully now that this got some traction they will provide some more time. - There are a lot of situations where devs cannot change the CDN any longer. I for one won't trust CDNs (including CDNJS) for anything durable any longer, which seems a big loss for Cloudflare.
- CJefferson 10y ago
  Worse, mathjax is very popular with statically generated sites. Any pelican or Jekyll website you see with maths probably has this CDN hardwired into it. I am involved with 2 projects where we hard wired it into our docs. Worse, the full download is massive, so it's tempting to not local host it. There are some cryptic messages about reducing the size, which link to out of date pages. If they were going to do this, they could at least have decent docs on how to locally host in a small size.
  - majewsky 10y ago
    It's right in the article, under the "Optimization" header.
- manigandham 10y ago
  > I for one won't trust CDNs (including CDNJS) for anything durable any longer, which seems a big loss for Cloudflare. Why? This has nothing to do with CDNs. This is a single account that can't afford to pay the bill anymore. CloudFlare itself isn't going anywhere. You can use https://www.jsdelivr.com https://www.jsdelivr.com which is one of the best open-source hosts backed by several networks - or just host everything yourself and put a CDN in front for your own users.
reustle 10y ago
I wonder if BuiltWith would be willing to release a list for free of sites using MathJax, so someone could build a tool to notify them all if contact info can be found
kyledrake 10y ago
It would be interesting to see what they tried to bill them. I can push out 70TB for about $700 right now (through our 11 PoP anycast network). AWS S3 would have cost $5,717.85 according to their calculator. My guess is the bill is somewhere in the middle. If you don't need a fancy anycast network, you can buy a 1GbE pipe from Hurricane Electric for about $400/mo and push 192TB/mo through it. Actually they include that when you get their $400/mo server cabinets in the bay area. Probably not the best option ever, but I don't think S3 is 14.29x better than it. Dedicated server providers like OVH might be okay with it too, probably ask them first. But if you had 2-4 servers and round-robined them my guess is you would be fine. You could get one server in Europe and one in NA and GeoDNS them and get probably-good-enough close to what an anycast network can do. For ~$200/mo. Not too bad. I've given my rant a million times so I won't do it again, but "The Cloud" heavily upcharges on bandwidth. Or they tell you it's "unlimited" (a word I've learned through experience to hate) then tell you "except for the kind of stuff you're doing" and send a bill or shut you down. If you've got to ship a ton of bandwidth, you should at least look into the alternatives. If you really want to go future tech, look into something like IPFS (https://ipfs.io https://ipfs.io) - it was built for stuff like this and it's going to make a real dent in transit costs for heavy data sets, CDNs, package distribution and the like. I absolutely cannot wait for the distributed web.
- Veratyr 10y ago
  > I've given my rant a million times so I won't do it again, but "The Cloud" heavily upcharges on bandwidth. Or they tell you it's "unlimited" (a word I've learned through experience to hate) then tell you "except for the kind of stuff you're doing" and send a bill or shut you down. If you've got to ship a ton of bandwidth, you should at least look into the alternatives. It stuns me just how bad it upcharges and how much it could be hurting their business. I can imagine so many use-cases where reasonably priced bandwidth would drive consumption elsewhere. I use cloud storage for backups without worrying about the insane cost of a restore. I could send large video production files to cloud storage, use cloud compute to produce renders and then download the processed files again without paying a multiple of the compute cost on bandwidth. To illustrate a bit on that video example, 4K 422 ProRes HQ is 424 GB/hr [0]. Assuming I have say 2h of footage I want processed, that's 848GB. Then if I need say 2h on 2x g2.8xlarge GPU instances to process the video, that's $2.78 * 2 * 2 = $11.12 for the entire process. Then I need to download that 848GB again, that's $76.32. The cost of retrieving the processed data is 7x the cost of processing it, that's insane. [0]: https://ssl.apple.com/final-cut-pro/docs/Apple_ProRes_White_Paper.pdf https://ssl.apple.com/final-cut-pro/docs/Apple_ProRes_White_...
abhirag 10y ago
Jupyter Notebooks containing maths and exported as html are also going to get affected. I personally write my articles in a Jupyter Notebook and export them to html and put them on my site so need to update a few of them.
ims 10y ago
Github code search for 'script src "cdn.mathjax.org"': > 1,811,496 code results. Woof.

151 points by JohnHammersley 10y ago

zerop 10y ago

Lots of products become popular when they are actually announced here as shutting down :)

So, yeah, ugh, why would a niche library (in the sense that it's not jQuery or YUI) need to operate its own CDN, for anything other than style points? There are major players who are already doing this who own and operate their own network (see MaxCDN). What's wrong with just plugging into their existing infrastructure? If that fails, I'd give a shout to FDCServers or LeaseWeb (or of that capacity) and see what they can do. I know of a handful of people who've moved 100TB monthly for less than $100/month, just because they asked.

stablemap 10y ago
Was this the case in 2011 when MathJax began offering this? I don't know the answer.
- joshmn 10y ago
  In 2011 were they piping 70TB?
taspeotis 10y ago
You say "niche" but... > 179 Million monthly users and 70TB traffic last month
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
buu700 10y ago
Why is this downvoted? Nitpicking of the phrase "niche library" aside, I'm having trouble understanding this without more context as well. The post starts: > Our CDN has been an important part of MathJax’s history. When MathJax made its first public release in 2010, hosting a library like MathJax was a complex challenge. The CDN launched a year later and helped resolve this difficulty What is "like MathJax" alluding to? Standing up a web host to serve a single JS file sounds like the opposite of a "complex challenge", so there must be something else going on here. After reading further down, I see that the post does mention that "A common concern with local installations is the size of a complete copy of MathJax, in particular the ~29,000 PNGs", so I guess that's what they're talking about? If so, the comments at the top make more sense and their having had their own CDN at all is more understandable in that light, but it seems needlessly confusing not to lead with that explanation.
- joshmn 10y ago
  Your guess is as good as mine. I edited my original post to reflect my subjectiveness of niche. I guess my point was that... Okay, so they took advantage of CloudFlare. Great, plenty of people do that, but not on the scale of 10s of TBs. What plan were they on with CF? The $20/month one? If I was a provider, I wouldn't want someone moving that volume of data through my pipes for $20/month (but as a developer, I'd love it) They mentioned how Google provided free storage. Storage is so cheap! Providers make their money on bandwidth. Having said, I can't imagine what kind of price they paid for bandwidth. Like I alluded to in my (now edited) original post: Guys, it never hurts to do your research in the hosting space and learn that there is more to hosting than just AWS/Google/Azure/Heroku/OVH/DigitalOcean/Vultr. Go to webhostingtalk.com, learn a bit, browse the offers forums, write some emails, compare providers, ask questions. Hosting isn't complicated, especially compared to some of the problems you're/we're solving.
  - lrem 10y ago
    Let's say you don't care about DDOS protection and can live with 0.1x the number of PoPs. How much does it cost these days to host these terabytes/month from ≥10 well spread locations?

infinity0 10y ago

> We recommend cdnjs which uses CloudFlare for delivery Oh man, so close to > We recommend cjdns (which is against everything CloudFlare stands for) for delivery

thomasfoster96 10y ago
> which is against everything CloudFlare stands for Could you explain this? Have I missed some big Cloudflare news?
- geofft 10y ago
  For context, cjdns appears to be a routing suite for implementing a darknet overlay over the normal internet. I'm not entirely sure what Cloudflare is perceived to stand for, but it is a strongly centralized service and cjdns appears to be going for decentralization. (But I'd imagine a Cloudflare-like service, including centralized management = economies of scale in sysadminning, would still be valuable in a cjdns darknet.) See https://github.com/cjdelisle/cjdns https://github.com/cjdelisle/cjdns , https://hyperboria.net/ https://hyperboria.net/ , and https://www.reddit.com/r/darknetplan/ https://www.reddit.com/r/darknetplan/
- yclept 10y ago
  cjdns is a different thing from cdnjs
  - thomasfoster96 10y ago
    Thanks, I thought it was a typo.

nikdaheratik 10y ago

It's kind of strange to think that you need fewer of your own server resources the more successful your software is at meeting its goals, but this seems to be one of those cases.

pacaro 10y ago

I just noticed this last week. I was trying to work out how to use MathJax directly from within JS to render math inline with rendering the rest of my content, rather than asynchronously after the fact. I love MathJax, but I'm now rendering math on the server using a latex -> dvisvgm pipeline and caching the results

jnetterf 10y ago
Depending on your use case, KaTeX [1] may be worth a look. It has a "renderToString" function that returns an HTML string. [1] https://khan.github.io/KaTeX https://khan.github.io/KaTeX
- The_suffocated 10y ago
  One problem of KaTeX is that its feature set is too small. It doesn't even support some very basic commands such as \overrightarrow.

elcct 10y ago

You can get that traffic for cheap from online.net or ovh

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

tyingq 10y ago

Interesting that the solution doesn't change the problem at all. As far as I can tell, cdnjs doesn't pay Cloudflare either. So all the traffic still flows through Cloudflare, unpaid. Cloudflare is listed as a sponsor for cdnjs. Guess it just keeps the list of who CF subsidizes shorter.

zzzcpan 10y ago
Cdnjs advertises Cloudflare to developers in its url, it's a significant difference.
btown 10y ago
Realistically, many legacy sites using this for rendering will just break and stay broken. Academic upload-and-forget posts, etc. Users may be unhappy but the overall volume of requests could drop. Additionally, every sponsorship may have a fixed cost to someone in the organization, some manager who would rather read a 20 line vs. 100 line report. And I doubt mathematicians and physicists drive the CF bottom line. Generosity has its limits.
- jmts 10y ago
  I thought the same thing regarding legacy sites. My workplace blocks file sharing and image hosting websites, so I've been acutely aware of the impact to UX recently when domains disappear. I can be almost certain now that when there are no images on a blog or stackoverflow post that they were hosted on imgur. I've been considering this for a while but it seems somewhat curious to me that not so long ago hotlinking was a big no-no and as sites disappeared broken image icons on small websites multiplied, and now we have an increasing number of CDNs where hotlinking is essentially the intended usage.
  - Dylan16807 10y ago
    Have you asked what the justification is for allowing general internet sites but not image hosting sites? I can't imagine it's at all reasonable.

aplaice 10y ago

Will the developers of Chromium and Edge perhaps reconsider incorporating native support for MathML in light of this, considering that apparently people do use maths on the web? 180 million monthly users is a significant portion of the world's population. I'm not sure to what extent MathJax is cached, so it's possible that these are not 180 million unique users. On the other hand, this does not include all those self-hosting MathJax, using KaTeX or just using server-generated images (for example Wikipedia†). †It's possible to force Wikipedia to use native MathML (which, at least on Firefox, looks really nice) or MathJax, but it's non-trivial. https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=6606 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=6606 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=152430 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=152430 https://wpdev.uservoice.com/forums/257854-microsoft-edge-developer/suggestions/6508572-mathml https://wpdev.uservoice.com/forums/257854-microsoft-edge-dev...

askvictor 10y ago
Yeah; I'm quite surprised, particularly given both Google's and Microsoft's push into the education market, that there is still not solution for this. MS certain has the edge (pardon the pun) with its maths tools in Word and Onenote, but lacking on the web. And that Google has given absolutely no consideration to this with Docs/Drive and related tools means that my school can't switch exclusively to G-Suite, and need to keep MS tools (and have to deal with installations and licensing) around.
chr1 10y ago
People use math, but they use it with Latex not MathML, MathML is too verbose, so even if browsers implemented it people would need libraries like MathJax.
- runarberg 10y ago
  Nothing is stopping you from authoring your math however you like as long as there are tools that support the translation[1]: [1]: http://fred-wang.github.io/TeXZilla/ http://fred-wang.github.io/TeXZilla/
- 10y ago

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

mp3geek 10y ago

I thought cloudflare didn't have a data cap? I'm somewhat concerned.

tyingq 10y ago
See https://www.cloudflare.com/terms https://www.cloudflare.com/terms Specifically, SECTION 10: LIMITATION ON NON-HTML CACHING.

jnpatel 10y ago

Is there a way in which MathJax could redirect their cdn.mathjax.org to cdnjs.cloudflare.com and maintain backwards compatibility for existing sites? A DNS redirect would break the SSL, right? Perhaps a HTTP 3xx redirect?

bhouston 10y ago
HTTP 3xx would work fine, but you would need an active server there. But really setting up nginx with such rules as basically the only thing it is doing to handle these requests on OVH or some other fairly unlimited bandwidth server shouldn't be too hard.
jgrahamc 10y ago
Yes.

Hydraulix989 10y ago

I have an old web site hosted by my university that has several math equations on it using MathJax. Unfortunately, since graduating, I no longer have access to it, but my professor still hosts all of past students' content for us. I'm just glad that I had the foresight to have hosted my own copy of that library.

kevin_thibedeau 10y ago

Is there any way to make Sphinx use its own copy of the script rather than the CDN?

slackoverflower 10y ago

I read that as MaxCDN shutting down.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

lpage 10y ago

I switched from MathJax to a middleman + execjs + KaTeX pipeline for my static sites earlier this year, and I'm very happy with it overall. KaTeX isn't 1-1 with MathJax when it comes to syntax support; I was surprised to see that underset and overset - which are ubiquitous - aren't supported. That said, I was able to work around every issue with alternative syntax. It's awesome that the heavy lifting is no longer client side, and it's a significantly easier build pipeline than MathJax if you're trying to generate a single minimized script or use webpack.

rahimnathwani 10y ago
Is there a reason why ebooks don't use KaTeX? I subscribe to safaribooksonline.com, which presents HTML versions of ebooks. I think they're just unpackaged versions of epub or mobi versions. Anyway, I'm surprised that equations are generally embedded in images, even in recent (published this month) O'Reilly-published books. Is there some technical reason why authors/publishers do it this way, or is it just about tooling? Gitbook claims that it works: https://www.gitbook.com/blog/features/katex https://www.gitbook.com/blog/features/katex

franciscop 10y ago

What a huge mess. - Only 1 month to re-route 70TB of content. I wonder if even over 10% will be re-routed, with all the other sites broken. - Cloudflare notice could have beem some months in. Hopefully now that this got some traction they will provide some more time. - There are a lot of situations where devs cannot change the CDN any longer. I for one won't trust CDNs (including CDNJS) for anything durable any longer, which seems a big loss for Cloudflare.

CJefferson 10y ago
Worse, mathjax is very popular with statically generated sites. Any pelican or Jekyll website you see with maths probably has this CDN hardwired into it. I am involved with 2 projects where we hard wired it into our docs. Worse, the full download is massive, so it's tempting to not local host it. There are some cryptic messages about reducing the size, which link to out of date pages. If they were going to do this, they could at least have decent docs on how to locally host in a small size.
- majewsky 10y ago
  It's right in the article, under the "Optimization" header.
manigandham 10y ago
> I for one won't trust CDNs (including CDNJS) for anything durable any longer, which seems a big loss for Cloudflare. Why? This has nothing to do with CDNs. This is a single account that can't afford to pay the bill anymore. CloudFlare itself isn't going anywhere. You can use https://www.jsdelivr.com https://www.jsdelivr.com which is one of the best open-source hosts backed by several networks - or just host everything yourself and put a CDN in front for your own users.

reustle 10y ago

I wonder if BuiltWith would be willing to release a list for free of sites using MathJax, so someone could build a tool to notify them all if contact info can be found

kyledrake 10y ago

It would be interesting to see what they tried to bill them. I can push out 70TB for about $700 right now (through our 11 PoP anycast network). AWS S3 would have cost $5,717.85 according to their calculator. My guess is the bill is somewhere in the middle. If you don't need a fancy anycast network, you can buy a 1GbE pipe from Hurricane Electric for about $400/mo and push 192TB/mo through it. Actually they include that when you get their $400/mo server cabinets in the bay area. Probably not the best option ever, but I don't think S3 is 14.29x better than it. Dedicated server providers like OVH might be okay with it too, probably ask them first. But if you had 2-4 servers and round-robined them my guess is you would be fine. You could get one server in Europe and one in NA and GeoDNS them and get probably-good-enough close to what an anycast network can do. For ~$200/mo. Not too bad. I've given my rant a million times so I won't do it again, but "The Cloud" heavily upcharges on bandwidth. Or they tell you it's "unlimited" (a word I've learned through experience to hate) then tell you "except for the kind of stuff you're doing" and send a bill or shut you down. If you've got to ship a ton of bandwidth, you should at least look into the alternatives. If you really want to go future tech, look into something like IPFS (https://ipfs.io https://ipfs.io) - it was built for stuff like this and it's going to make a real dent in transit costs for heavy data sets, CDNs, package distribution and the like. I absolutely cannot wait for the distributed web.

Veratyr 10y ago
> I've given my rant a million times so I won't do it again, but "The Cloud" heavily upcharges on bandwidth. Or they tell you it's "unlimited" (a word I've learned through experience to hate) then tell you "except for the kind of stuff you're doing" and send a bill or shut you down. If you've got to ship a ton of bandwidth, you should at least look into the alternatives. It stuns me just how bad it upcharges and how much it could be hurting their business. I can imagine so many use-cases where reasonably priced bandwidth would drive consumption elsewhere. I use cloud storage for backups without worrying about the insane cost of a restore. I could send large video production files to cloud storage, use cloud compute to produce renders and then download the processed files again without paying a multiple of the compute cost on bandwidth. To illustrate a bit on that video example, 4K 422 ProRes HQ is 424 GB/hr [0]. Assuming I have say 2h of footage I want processed, that's 848GB. Then if I need say 2h on 2x g2.8xlarge GPU instances to process the video, that's $2.78 * 2 * 2 = $11.12 for the entire process. Then I need to download that 848GB again, that's $76.32. The cost of retrieving the processed data is 7x the cost of processing it, that's insane. [0]: https://ssl.apple.com/final-cut-pro/docs/Apple_ProRes_White_Paper.pdf https://ssl.apple.com/final-cut-pro/docs/Apple_ProRes_White_...

abhirag 10y ago

Jupyter Notebooks containing maths and exported as html are also going to get affected. I personally write my articles in a Jupyter Notebook and export them to html and put them on my site so need to update a few of them.

ims 10y ago

Github code search for 'script src "cdn.mathjax.org"': > 1,811,496 code results. Woof.