TrasHTTPandas – Trash Panda HTTP Responses

Amazing work.

This is so cool :)

Introduced by twitter IIRC. When used it generally means you've hit some sort of rate limit. 429 "Too Many Requests" is usually more appropriate.

The code had a previous (now deprecated and possibly no more official when it was in use) hence the gap in the list of official codes.

This is super cute, but unfortunately it's currently both misconfigured and broken. Very easy fixes though.

Firstly, it's eyebrow-raisingly slow. A quick network check shows everything is capped at 100kbps download. For PNG images that translates to a hitch-y 2-3 second pause.

Secondly, the slowness is amplified to the point of "this needs fixing" by the total lack of caching. Everything pauses every time the image loads.

Thirdly,

  $ wget -O- https://httpraccoons.com/jpeg/100 | md5sum
  ...
  Length: 530755 (518K) [image/jpeg]
  ...
  9a7aa269111ca315277bbec79bfab5c1

  $ wget -O- https://httpraccoons.com/100 | md5sum
  ...
  Length: 530755 (518K) [image/png]
  ...
  9a7aa269111ca315277bbec79bfab5c1

It's changing the mimetype but serving the same image!

Critically, besides these issues, this is perfect and fit for purpose :)

The wepb images are smaller and load pretty fast.