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Hotmail about to collapse under load
An AC submitted this interesting tidbit from those folks over at NetCraft. To quote from the page: "HotMail has commenced its much awaited migration to a Microsoft operating system.
Some Windows 2000 machines have recently been moved into the load balancing pool,
with currently between 90-95% of requests being served by the established
FreeBSD/Apache platform, and 5-10% from Windows 2000." This is not the first time MS are believed to have attempted this (but I'd appreciate hard evidence confirming that, instead of the more normal rumours and whispers).
1. It will fail miserably, and the BSD community will cry *SEE! WE'RE BETTER!* and it will disappear in the mists of time. How many MCSE's do you know that talk openly about the previous Hotmail efforts? None, that I know, anyway.
Or,
2. It will succeed, tremendously, and then MS will use it as a massive PR campaign, how they replaced the "superior" BSD. The other side (thats us, I guess) will grumble "yeah, with double the number of machines/many times the cost/lots of effort/etc" and we'll go back to telling the boss that its NT and not Samba.
Or,
3. It will be a partial success, MS will Service Pack and Hotfix away, and both sides will claim victory, anyway.
But you already knew that.
ZOMG I WOULD LOVE TO KNOW ABOUT YOUR FEELINGS ON MACINTOSH VERSUS WINDOWS, VI VERSUS EMACS, AND HOW YOU'RE NOT A DORK
I setup a hotmail account long ago just to get my /. login. I've never posted that address anywhere else, and I rarely even check the mail there. But I generally have 20-30 spams in 6 months. How can that be? Either /. is leaking addresses or spammers are trying names at random.
Anyway, back ontopic: I just went and tried to get in. It took SEVERAL seconds to load each page. That's slower than I've ever seen it. And don't tell me it's the Slashdot Effect--something the size of hotmail should handle that.
--
Linux MAPI Server!
http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
(Exchange Migration HOWTO coming soon)
Consider it a failure of MySQL ;-)
;-(
heh, yes, I'm rabidly anti-mysql, and after studying the mysql docs for many years and seeing how the mysql guys do things, I've decided they are fucked in the head to put it mildly. They've decided that 20 years+ of RDBMS research is just plain wrong and decided that table-level locks is the way to go and that transactions are not a good way to do things. Not to mention that foreign keys are just a hassle...
I wouldnt mind so much except everyone's pushing MySQL as a oracle-replacement! I mean jeez, sure its fast... as long as you keep your concurrency low...
which brings me to the last point, slashdot is slow because they're using mysql, the table concurrency is killing them... they used to generate the static-comment page once a minute with a little daemon thingy because they couldnt get performance from multiple-readers and multiple-writers to the same table.
FUCK!
Its like the last 20 years of good research and hard work hasn't ever happened... the multiple-readers/writers with good performance problem has been licked so many times, that its just sad to see software which still cant get it right...
ok.
bye for now.
I've seen a couple of comments here suggesting that Hotmail be slashdotted. How the hell are you going to accomplish this? How many users is Hotmail up to now? Last I heard it was over 40 million....how do you figure the couple of hundred thousand (that's being VERY generous) /. readers are even going to make Hotmail's servers even hiccup? You'd have about as much luck as /.-ing Yahoo...
I went to Netcraft's site and this was the response back from a request to Hotmail.
www.hotmail.com is running Apache/1.3.6 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.2.8 SSLeay/0.9.0b on Windows 2000
I am not one to jump to conclusions but something strange seems to be going on (or is it just me). Unix version of Apache on Windows 2000????
Conspiracy theorists will have a field day with this one.
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2.) NT (not to mention 2k) can handle just as many hits as Solaris, or any other Unix platform. This has been shown time and time again, but people seem to like to ignore facts and concentrate on a three year old story about poorly written back end code
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This is flat out untrue. NT particularly has, time and time again, shown itself to have a feeble TCP stack that buckles under load. I am not talking about the "lets slam it with a zillion connections for 15 minutes" tests. Show me a high trafficked NT box that has been up for longer than 60 days, particularly prior to SP6a. The Microsoft solution is clustering, that way when one of the machines craps out after being up for a week, it can be rebooted without affecting site availability. The NT stack (Win 2K inclusive) is just now, within the last 12 months, starting to achieve acceptable levels of reliability. I guess it's better late than never, but don't act like the reputation is unwarranted.
maru
The real problem IMHO is that Microsoft has nothing that even remotely compares to Sendmail. Without a world-class SMTP server(and Sendmail is the only one that I know of) I just don't see how they could handle a project of this magnitude.
I know there is a Sendmail for NT, but is it as solid and reliable as the UNIX version? My experience working with SMTP on NT tells me it wouldn't be, because it doesn't integrate with the OS as nicely as it does with UNIX. Correct me if I'm wrong.
No, Thursday's out. How about never - is never good for you?
I'm willing to bet that 5-10% of the mail doesn't get through! ;)
Here is the Link
Hetz (Heunique)
#!/bin/bash
i=1
while [ "$i" -lt 253 ]
do
lynx -head -dump http://lw7fd.law7.hotmail.msn.com/ |grep Server >>
let i="$i"+1
done
I got the following results:
- 202 "Apache/1.3.6 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.2.8 SSLeay/0.9.0b"
- 798 "Microsoft-IIS/5.0"
Disclaimer: I know nothing about Microsoft's load-balancing setup, or if I skewed the results in any way as a result of my choice of server. So I reproduce all data here.-Waldo
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I wouldn't be so smug: Slashdot just spent 92 seconds opening this edit page. Before that I waited almost three minutes for the article page with comments to load. And before that, I was surfing in directly to a specific single comment from an external link -- that never opened at all. I finally gave up on that window.
I'm sure Linux/Apache (or whatever you guys are running on over here, I don't follow that gossip) does have an overall stability edge over Redmond product, but NT was never the joke it's made out to be around here and 2000 is even more competitive.
----
lake effect weblog
{Network engineer in Chicago--looking for work!}
It's a risky PR move. As it stands, geeks laugh at them because a site that should be the flagship of the MSN empire doesn't run MS software. But then geeks laugh at them anyway.
If/when they move to Win2K (I would assume Datacenter, does anyone know for sure?), and it works, then the marketing folks can point at it and say, "HotMail runs Win2K and it will surely work for your smaller site". The danger is there because the whole site could just crumble if Win2K isn't up to the task. If that happens, mainstream press like the Wall Street Journal will run front page articles saying that Win2K choked in the face of major hits. That damage could be irreperable. I know the the adoption of 2000 has been modest (to put it nicely). This could be a very important move for MS.
-B
If it proves that Win2k and BSD can cooperate in the same environment, even temporarily. Think about it. All along we've been trying to convince businesses to introduce Linux/BSD into their computing environments. What better ammunition to use on them than this?
"But boss, Microsoft is doing it..."
Visit the
Am I reading the right page, because I don't see anything about Hotmail about to collapse under load. Can we please try to stay away from catchy but misleading news titles?
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Let's get some facts straight.
1.) The reason Hotmail crapped out the first time in 1997 on NT was not because it couldn't handle the 10mil + users, but because the software was written in a way that was not happy on NT. In fact, the software was designed by the same people who designed the original back end code for the Solaris version of Hotmail. Basically, they just ported their code, that hardly ever works right.
2.) NT (not to mention 2k) can handle just as many hits as Solaris, or any other Unix platform. This has been shown time and time again, but people seem to like to ignore facts and concentrate on a three year old story about poorly written back end code.
3.) The reason they are doing it step by step (as in not just going, BOOM... all 20mil users on Win2k now,) is for debugging reasons. If a few thousand accounts get screwed, that's much easier to fix than a few million.
There are MANY sites on the net that get far more traffic than hotmail (the MSN homepage for instance) and they handle the load just fine. Doesn't that make you think?
It's not the number of *accounts* that matters, it's the number of simultaneous users.
There is nothing related here to justify the headline. Pure FUD. I can understand the move on Microsoft's part though -- it's got to stick in their craw that their most successful net service has been running on Unix since day one. I wonder if they expect any benefits (besides marketing) from the "upgrade"?
While I'm on the topic of misleading Win2000 figures, allow me to quote Microsoft's latest full-page newspaper ad:
That means nothing, of course, since the numbers aren't in. Wouldn't expect them to wait, though.
Kook9 out.
Once all the results are in, I expect to be heralded the greatest lover on the planet.
From what I have seen, Win2000 is not your father's NT. I've had lots of trouble keeping windows NT running my web apps, but windows 2000 seems more stable. I still have my doubts about it being better than any unix derivative, and so I moving all my code to platform independence, and it will probably end up on AIX (I am trying to get some linux/FreeBSD boxen up and running, but I have to clear off the servers running NT right now. (there are too many other employees who readily jump into the easy but proprietary trap where I work))
I need a TiVo for my car. Pause live traffic now.
What better way could there possibly be to test how a product holds up under high stress than to attach it to a giant e-mail network, first attempting to take 5% of the load, and then slowly incrementing it to see if and when it will choke?
And if you don't particularly want to be a beta tester, maybe you shouldn't use a giant, unruly, insecure, slow, free e-mail account as your primary mail provider. Sheesh.
As much as most of us hate Microsoft, this experiment can only do harm to hotmail. It can't really do harm to the software being tested, and it might actually end up improving it.
"Beware he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he deems himself your master."
Just for the record, I would not mind seeing MS use more of Linux because they can definately learn some things from Unix-derived OSes (like Linux and *BSD and Unix itself).
- Alex
The story, as posted, said that Microsoft has moved machines into its load-balancing pool. It made no mention of removing the BSD machines. Adding nodes can only make the system faster, regardless of whether the new nodes are Windows or BSD.
:)
Perhaps they could have made a better choice of OS, for *name your favorite reason here*. But hey, it's Microsoft, and they're in love with thier own stuff! Aren't we all?