4 ms·

In step 3 the servers asking for the image are acting as agents of the followers, not of the original poster, no?

• willcipriano 2y ago
  Why did the original poster post it if not to have the image downloaded to be displayed in his friends feeds?
  • jefftk 2y ago
    The image isn't actually the issue: it's the html for the web page. The image is static and quick to serve, the html is often dynamically generated for each visitor. Thinking about other similar distributed systems, if I put a link to an html page in an RSS feed or a mailing list message, it's not normal for subscribers to be using clients that fetch linked pages. But if they did it's clearly as an agent of that user, and not as an agent of the poster?
    • willcipriano 2y ago
      If I was the web service getting hit I'd be glad that somebody is even interested enough that I'm having this problem. I also have the wisdom to know complaining is unlikely to solve my issue. I get paid to basically solve this sort of scaling problems so I'm not a great barometer but it isn't that hard to handle a traffic spike like this.