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Are Internet News Sites Ready for Major World News?

Posted by Cliff on from the handling-the-load dept.

An anonymous reader asks: "Heading says it all really - are Internet news websites ready for the next big world event? news.bbc.co.uk already switches format under heavy load (not sure if this is automatic or not) and i'm sure some other sites do the same. But should a major world event take place in the coming months/years, the Internet is going to be the primary news source for many millions of people, particularly those without access to a quality television news service. How will / can it cope?"

4 of 304 comments (clear)

  1. quality television news service? by Galahad · · Score: 0, Redundant

    Surely you jest!

    --
    --jdp Maintainer of VisEmacs
  2. Re:won't replace TV by Citizen+of+Earth · · Score: 1, Redundant

    By the time that the rest of the engineers and the admin staff arrived, CNN was almost unreachable. We did get to watc about 15 minutes more of the coverage before we lost connection.

    One thing that news sites need to do, which some did manually after a few hours of being down, is to respond to heavy load by reducing the number of bytes per page & processing load. First, they should switch to static pages, and then they should trim down graphical content until the pages are all text. And this should be done automatically. I suspect that most people are at work when the bulk of news stories hit.

  3. Re:September 11th by blibbleblobble · · Score: 1, Redundant

    "It was interesting as it showed the Internet both failing at and succeeding in its primary designed function, as a communications and information network that could survive a major catastrophe."

    More to the point, succeeding in its designed role as a distributed peer-to-peer system, and failing in the commercial idea of centralised publishers.

  4. At present... by nenolod · · Score: 0, Redundant
    At present, websites are not designed well enough to balance a major load. Sites built on mod_perl, for example. mod_perl is an Apache module that offers a built in link to your system's Perl interpreter. Mod_perl is a very good module, yet there are some problems with it. mod_perl requires some cpu time to work, even though when it works, it works well. If you were to run a site that uses mod_perl, then load balancing would definately be recommended. There are alternatives to mod_perl, such as PHP, Zope, CFM, ASP and JSP. ASP is not exactly a programming language though, it is dependant on other languages. ASP just provides scripting functionality. JSP is known as Java Server Pages, and it has similar problems as mod_perl, it requires a scriptlet server to run, and since it's running on a virtual machine, it's efficiency is lowered. PHP is a good scripting language, and offers high functionality. CFM, which is developed by Macromedia, is similar to PHP in it's functionality and efficiency, but costs money. Zope is based on python, uses a dataspace for datastorage, and in the case that you need to pack the ZODB, you can experience difficulties. There are other languages, that are developed by other companies, but they are also costly to implement. Vignette can be consider as an example.

    The only option is to use load balancing and PHP, as that is the only way that efficiency can be effectively offered to the typical user, which most sites are not using.