Slashdot Mirror
Scaling Server Performance
An anonymous reader writes "When Ace's Hardware's article Hitchhiker's Guide to the Mainframe was posted on Slashdot, they got 590,000 hits and over 250,000 page requests during one day. This kind of traffic caused only a 21% average CPU load to their Java-based web server, which is powered by a single 550MHz UltraSparc-II CPU. In their newest article, Scaling Server Performance, Ace's Hardware explains how this was possible."
I would be more interested in stats on a webserver that took a puke. It would be interesting to see what started the dominos falling and what ultimatly brought it down. It would be as good a learning experiance as this article is.
Reloading their page a couple times (2nd page of the article, not the one slashdot linked to), I'm getting occasional 503 errors, and the rest are taking a very long time to load. Usually the page comes up with some "broken" images that didn't load.
At the bottom of each page, there's a number that seems to indicate the time they believe their server spent serving the page. Usually is says something like "2 ms" or "3 ms"... That may be how long their code spent creating the html, but the real world performance I see (via a 1.5 Mbit/sec DSL line) is many seconds for the html and many more for the images, some of which never show up, and sometimes a 503 error instead of anything useful at all.
So, Brian, if you're reading this comment (which will probably be worthy of "redundant" moderation by the time I hit the Submit button)... it ain't workin' as well as you think. Maybe the next article will be an explaination of what went wrong this time, and you can try again???
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
I remember reading that original article, and yes, I was impressed at the responsiveness of the server. But before they are congratulated so much, consider this. The original story was posted on slashdot at 1AM.. so the initial spike of activity resulting from the linking being in the top few on Slashdot was directly proportional to the number of people on Slashdot at the time. As you can see from their graphs (if they're showing up for you) that traffic spiked, then continued on during the day.
This time around, the link got posted at 2PM not 1AM, and so far as I can see, they handle this flurry of hits much less gracefully than the previous ones! There are a lot more people online at 2PM than 1AM (all arguments of nocturnal nighthawks and people in other time zones aside).
I am familiar with serving dynamic content of very high information density, and let me tell you, Ace's doesn't compare. The data I serve from work is updated every second; the stories on Ace's (and most other hardware-review sites) change every couple of days.