6 ms·
Ask HN: A Git-like diff server for web assets
This idea popped into my head and I wanted to get the HN community's opinion:
Would serving diffs of static assets on the web improve loading speed and reduce server load?
Instead of serving an entirely new file to be downloaded every time changes are made, compile diffs for the last 10 or so releases and then serve them based on a visitors' current version, supplied as a release code in request url. Then, make the changes and cache the new file(s).
Does this exist? If not, why?
- tedmiston 7y agoIt's not quite what you described but static asset fingerprinting or asset digest fingerprinting is a good place to start. In theory, if you're using this behind a cache or CDN, then you've already heavily optimized your server load for serving static assets. I haven't seen any sort of a diff-based approach to caching in the browser. I don't think there is a notion of cache "layers" for an arbitrary binary file in a browser to easily support this, but that doesn't mean you couldn't build it. Maybe you could use localStorage / sessionStorage here? Another research term that might be useful is incremental caching. This seems relatively new but cache digests could also be useful here. https://calendar.perfplanet.com/2016/cache-digests-http2-server-push/ https://calendar.perfplanet.com/2016/cache-digests-http2-ser...