Well my server is still running, which is a nice surprise. Over 8000 people took a look at yesterday's distributed raytracer, rendering 108,000 lines between them. That's a lot more than I was anticipating — thanks to all of you for taking a look.

It became apparent today that I had done woefully little background research before posting this — Resig has posted an article about web workers that has an example of a canvas based ray-tracer that uses them to great effect. By using web workers I can get rid of a whole load of hacks that result in the currently minimal cpu usage on each node.

I think my favorite response was courtesy of thunk on Hacker News:

This is going to totally re^H^Hinvent social raytracing.

Thanks all