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BBC on Website Slow Downs

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the sure-gets-tricky dept.

HiveMaster writes "The BBC is carrying a report about the impact on websites as people try to get news regarding the war in Iraq. It talks of a report from Keynote Systems, which tests the reponsiveness of websites, which shows that the BBC news site has shown a fourfold increase in response times. However, Government sites in both the US and the UK are being hit, with the US Army site taking over 80 seconds to load at peak times." Also, here is a press release this. You can also read My journal where I've talked quite a bit about what Slashdot has done in preperation for traffic bursts.

206 comments

  1. God bless the Internet! by ChaoticChaos · · Score: 0

    God bless the Internet!

    1. Re:God bless the Internet! by at_kernel_99 · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Curiously enough, Pravda also has a story on the subject.

  2. Hmmm... by TopShelf · · Score: 3, Funny

    so if Taco posts a link to his own journal in the article header, can he /. /.???

    --
    Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
    1. Re:Hmmm... by Ann+Coulter · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I've always wondered, why is /. immune to the /. effect anyway?

    2. Re:Hmmm... by Didion+Sprague · · Score: 2, Funny

      If /. /.'s /., then is it still officially a /.?

    3. Re:Hmmm... by Kircle · · Score: 5, Interesting

      nope, but an interesting side effect could probably be more ad impressions and as a result, more revenue. honestly, /. could easily get more advertising impressions if they started temporarily mirroring the content from the stories posted on slashdot. everyone knows about the slashdot effect. why not use that in a manner where both slashdot and slashdot readers benefit?

      --

      -- Kircle

    4. Re:Hmmm... by Chibi · · Score: 3, Informative


      I've always wondered, why is /. immune to the /. effect anyway?




      Here's a link to the "Tech" section of the FAQ, which is probably a good place to start.

      --
      If all you have are silver bullets, everything looks like a werewolf.
    5. Re:Hmmm... by John+Zebedee · · Score: 3, Funny

      How much / could a /.ter / if a /.ter could /. /.?

      --
      The future is here. It's just not evenly distributed yet. -- William Gibson
    6. Re:Hmmm... by dhovis · · Score: 4, Informative

      OK, why did this get modded up?

      Slashdot is a high traffic website, and as such, it has to be designed to handle the load that it gets. Sites that get /.ed are usually low traffic sites that aren't set up to the sort of page views that Slashdot.

      OTOH, Slashdot generally doesn't have any effect on other high traffic sites. You don't see the /. effect on sites like CNN, Microsoft, Apple, Cisco, or the NY Times. It is when Slashdot links to someone who put up a picture of their case mod, they likely aren't set up to handle the same sort of traffic that /. does and they become inaccessable.

      --

      --
      The internet is the greatest source of biased information in the history of mankind.

    7. Re:Hmmm... by StoryMan · · Score: 0, Offtopic

      What was weird about Scorpia was the way she wore perfume. She'd wear something normal like Chanel and her internal chemistry would weirdly transform it into this odd, highly-enriched attractor. None of us could keep our eyes off Scorpia on account she smelled so good.

      Damn, dude. That's the weirdest off-topic story I've *ever* read on Slashdot.

      I have no idea if you're making that up, but you creeped me out for the rest of the day.

      Bizarre.

      This is proof of why Slashdot rocks.

    8. Re:Hmmm... by EpsCylonB · · Score: 0, Offtopic

      your story reminds me of mulholland drive

    9. Re:Hmmm... by Error27 · · Score: 3, Funny

      Because it runs on MySQL.

    10. Re:Hmmm... by Kallahar · · Score: 1

      Because slashdot has well made servers with nice fat pipes. Many sites do not get "slashdotted" when they get slashdotted, it's only the smaller sites with cheap hosting that get taken down.

      Kallahar

    11. Re:Hmmm... by KelsoLundeen · · Score: 0, Offtopic

      Of course, Bobby was pretty rank, so everytime he'd go back on the set, we'd ask Scorpia to come out with her Chanel and her wacky body chemitry to defumigate the hallway.

      My vote for "Top 10 Weird Slashdot Sentence."

      You've been reading too much Thomas Pynchon, though. :)

    12. Re:Hmmm... by realdpk · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I'm not sure if this counts as /.'ing, but /. is quite frequently broken. It forgets that you are logged in, unable to verify your cookie I assume, and sometimes you can't even view articles, they just take you to the homepage.

      Then the next day it all works again (I only check a couple of times a day, so to be fair, it could have been fixed the same day)

    13. Re:Hmmm... by Photon+Ghoul · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I would mod you unfunny but there's no such option. Besides you tried too hard.

    14. Re:Hmmm... by Moloch666 · · Score: 0, Offtopic

      I learned these when I was like 8 and still can say them pretty good. How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck would chuck wood? A woodchuck would chuck as much wood as a woodchuck would chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood. I thought a thought, but the thought I wasn't the thought I thought. If the thought I thought was the thought I thought, I wouldn't have thought such a thought. They are much harder to type than say.

      --
      Understanding is a three-edged sword. -- Kosh Naranek
    15. Re:Hmmm... by Didion+Sprague · · Score: 0, Offtopic

      I once new a woman named Scorpia Marscopone who would have loved to set her ample peepers on a fucking pepper. Scorpia acted in a variety of porno flicks and one night after a shoot accidentally walked in front of a freight train.

      I'm not sure why this is mod'd as off-topic. I mean, it's a *little* off-topic, yeah. But it's a true story. And it it's directly tied into the /. tongue-twisters that were posted earlier.

      Moderation here troubles me. I think one requirement for moderation would be "sense of humor".

      Now, to move this back on-topic, let me add my two cents: http://www.agonist.org remains *the* best site for the current crisis. The dude running the site is posting almost (but not quite) minute-by-minute updates from a variety of sources. It's clearly a "top blog" for GWII, and it doesn't yet seem to be suffering from excessive load.

      Very nice site, Agonist.

    16. Re:Hmmm... by doofus1 · · Score: 1

      Actually, as I tried to load slashdot this afternoon, it appeared to have been slashdotted, or fubu'd by some jr sysadmin. I got a 500 server error that said to send a report to pater@slashdot.org instead of webmaster which I found kinda entertaining.

    17. Re:Hmmm... by james_underscore · · Score: 1

      OK, why did this get modded up?

      I guessed it was because the moderators saw it as a joke. It seems a little humourous to me.

      The more obvious reason slashdot can't get slashdotted, is because a slashdotting is when slashdot users overwhelm a site because its linked on the slashdot front page. If slashdot can serve all those users that link, then it can obviously take the load of all those users clicking the link. QED

      See the little ironic jest! ;) I know theres a war on but if you refuse to smile at all you'll forget how.

    18. Re:Hmmm... by dhovis · · Score: 1
      I guessed it was because the moderators saw it as a joke. It seems a little humourous to me.

      If it had been modded up as "funny", I would agree with you. However, the post was getting "insightful" mods. There was nothing insightful about it. I try not to get too up in arms about moderation, but that was just dumb. I seem to have had the desired effect, as the post was modded back down. I don't care if it gets modded back up as "funny", but to allow that post to get (Score:5, Insightful) is insulting to most of the /. community. It's like the karma whores who post CNN articles in the comments "in case of slashdotting", as though CNN doesn't handle vastly more traffic than Slashdot does.

      --

      --
      The internet is the greatest source of biased information in the history of mankind.

    19. Re:Hmmm... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      thats b/c i haxored it.

    20. Re:Hmmm... by mhesseltine · · Score: 0, Offtopic
      I would mod you unfunny but there's no such option.

      I've been on a small campaign to add an equal and opposite moderation to the mod system, eg: for +1 Funny, there would be a -1, Not funny. -1 Troll, +1 Not a troll.

      I know that this is offtopic, but does this sound like a good idea?

      --
      Overrated / Underrated : Moderation :: Anonymous Coward : Posting
    21. Re:Hmmm... by poot_rootbeer · · Score: 2, Informative

      Because, as someone invariably mentions every time someone proposes content mirroring as a solution to The Slashdot Effect, the legality of such an action would be marginal at best. I don't think OSDN particularly wants to spend money on defending itself in copyright infringement lawsuits all the time.

      Ad impressions for stories on a non-Slashdot site "belong" to the operators of that site, not to Slashdot. Mirroring a webpage would "steal" those ad impressions.

    22. Re:Hmmm... by The_K4 · · Score: 1

      Interesting. All those AMD/Intel debates on /. and they are all taking place on all Intel boxes. :)

    23. Re:Hmmm... by Sarcazmo · · Score: 1

      It does that when the database is down and it is flying on the static parts only.

    24. Re:Hmmm... by eyeye · · Score: 1

      Yes that sounds like a good idea.
      I sometimes think it could be good to add a comment to a moderation too like "cut and paste from other comment" so other mods and the person knows why.

      --
      Bush and Blair ate my sig!
    25. Re:Hmmm... by meta.chris · · Score: 1

      Sometimes there's a buggy.

    26. Re:Hmmm... by tc · · Score: 1

      Yeah, I've often wished for an inverse to "+1, Informative". How about "-1, Just Plain Wrong" to be used when someone posts a puported fact which is simply incorrect (and not a matter of opinion)?

    27. Re:Hmmm... by Bull999999 · · Score: 1

      How about people who starts the post with "I'm not a troll..." commnet? Will get get +1 Not a troll mod or get a -1 Troll for being a troll who's trying to act like a troll? I'm a troll for trolling trolls who try not to be a troll?

      --
      1f u c4n r34d th1s u r34lly n33d t0 g37 l41d
  3. Your Journal? by SuDZ · · Score: 3, Funny

    Shameless plug for your journal to get us to read it? ;)

    SuDZ

    1. Re:Your Journal? by unitron · · Score: 1
      I think he just wanted to enjoy knowing that we couldn't post any comments there.

      Did you see the part where he said "We're also going to move the AC default threshold to 2."? For a moment I though he meant that AC comments would start out scored at 2. Now that's a scary thought. Of course it's fun to think about
      ACs reloading the page and wondering why they can't see their own post.

      --

      I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.

  4. 9-11 by john_smith_45678 · · Score: 0

    Reminds me of the crushing traffic of 9/11/01.

    --
    John Kerry is a Joke!
  5. and it won't get any better... by babyblink · · Score: 5, Funny

    since you just slashdot it...

    --
    [self dealloc];
    1. Re:and it won't get any better... by James_Duncan8181 · · Score: 2, Funny

      As the BBC is the site with the highest traffic in Europe in think in this case it would be a beebing(?) of Slashdot.

      --
      "To any truly impartial person, it would be obvious that I am right."
  6. Satellite availability? by caseyc · · Score: 5, Informative

    Another factor that may be contributing to this is a sudden drop in availability of communications satellites. The Department of Defense has been buying up bandwidth on commercial com satellites for their own use during the war.

    1. Re:Satellite availability? by stef0x77 · · Score: 5, Informative

      Most of the net traffic, particularly across the atlantic travels on under-sea cables. Satellites are ususally used for remote areas or backup comnunications, due to latency and bandwidth issues.

  7. Put a proxy-cache in front of it. by iturbide · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Basically, as long as you don't get a bandwith problem, putting a proxy-cache configured for acceleration in front of the website itself is the way to go. In times like this, 95% of the visitors wants the same news. The cache will serve them their data, so that the server itself does not die under the load of having to rethink every individual request.

    1. Re:Put a proxy-cache in front of it. by MikeFM · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Also can have a mirror server on other bandwidth that rejects connections that don't come through a known caching proxy server. I like to reject traffic from people this way if my load becomes to high. That way anyone that still wants to access my server can use IRCache.net or some other major proxy servers. Any decent ISP should also offer such a proxy their users can use.

      --
      At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
    2. Re:Put a proxy-cache in front of it. by djh101010 · · Score: 4, Informative

      While a proxy-cache takes care of the server load issues, it just fixes half of the problem. Your cache then becomes the limiting factor, and the same problems with servicing the connections and load just gets displaced from one box to another.

      Page load times can be vastly improved by hiring someone with a bunch of capacity spread around the country/world, and having the content served from the closest server to the user. Akamai is one provider, there are probably others. Effectively, it gives you thousands of webservers to handle your load. Beats trying to predict when and how much the load is going to spike. (I wonder if any akamaized sites have been slashdotted, and how the usage graphs for that look?)

    3. Re:Put a proxy-cache in front of it. by BrookHarty · · Score: 3, Interesting

      IF your data can be cached. Same thing with slashdot, the webpage is rendered depending on your karma, and account. Cache wont work, when its re-rendered for each person. (It should work for all the AC's loading the same page thou...)

      We use cheap netra t1's in a cluster behind load balancers, but our bandwidth usage per user is very small (1-5K) compared to Slashdot 50-100K page pulls.

      Strange how people design networks and server configurations without knowing the purpose. This is why when a product is handed off to the customer, they customers end up redesignning the architecture. Its not a cookie cutter world people...

      -
      You know the world's gone mad when the best rapper is a white guy, the best golfer is a black guy, the Swiss hold the America's Cup, France is accusing the USA of arrogance and the Germans don't want to go to war.

    4. Re:Put a proxy-cache in front of it. by djh101010 · · Score: 1

      Actually, if you're rendering on the fly, but using static objects that are fetched separately (render the HTML, let it tell the browser which static objects to go fetch), you can still cache those static objects. Depending on the page, that could be dozens or hundreds of them. For something like a news article, with the same picture for everyone, and say 5 different languages that the text could be in, then you just have it get the text for whatever language, get the picture which is for all of 'em, and tell it to fetch from i.cnn.com (er, for instance). So, even though the layout of the page can be customized, the objects that you point to can still be set up so that you can take advantage of cacheing.

    5. Re:Put a proxy-cache in front of it. by evilviper · · Score: 1
      Your sig is annoying.

      You know the world's gone mad when the best rapper is a white guy, the best golfer is a black guy,

      Neither is the best. Music (and Rap too) is subjective, so no dice there. As for Tiger Woods, he is not that good of a golfer... he's just big in the media since he's the black-sheep in the herd, and he's all too happy to have multi-million dollar endorsements, which no respectible golfer will touch. What's so funny, is that he was getting all this acclaim from the media when he was still an amature, and couldn't even make it as a professional. It would be more fair to say that Al Gore is the president than this crap.

      France is accusing the USA of arrogance and the Germans don't want to go to war.

      France and Germany both have serious economic interests with Saddam Hussein... It's no surprise there. In fact, it's believed that France was a big supplier of WMD materials to Iraq. Besides, it's certainly not out of character for France to avoid war, and Germany would never go to war with it's allies (e.g. Itally).

      Your sig is ridiculous, and not funny in the slightest.
      --
      Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
  8. Comment removed by account_deleted · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  9. Ace's Hardware does it best. by BoomerSooner · · Score: 4, Interesting

    They run the whole thing off of a Sun Blade 500MHz with 2GB RAM.

    Pretty cool actually.

    1. Re:Ace's Hardware does it best. by pmz · · Score: 1

      They run the whole thing off of a Sun Blade 500MHz with 2GB RAM

      And, according to the FAQ, Slashdot is run off 600MHz CPUs in a modestly-sized cluster. Stuff like this makes me look at the crap-apps running on our SMP "enterprise" servers and shake my head.

      I think I've been hearing "we can just throw more hardware at it later" ever since my first 386...

      --
      Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
    2. Re:Ace's Hardware does it best. by consumer · · Score: 2, Interesting

      As many comments on this previous story point out, what they do at Ace's Hardware is not very impressive. They don't get much traffic, and they are serving what are essentially static pages. If they replaced their caching system with a bunch of static pages (generated by spidering their page generator maybe), it would have better performance. That's what Slashdot does for the front page when you aren't logged in.

  10. oi by Judg3 · · Score: 4, Funny

    "Here's a bunch of links to some sites that are really really unresponsive now because of the war. Everyone please go check them out"

    There's a joke in there somewhere, for sure.

    --
    Looking for hardware (Currently need: Large Etch-a-Sketch) Have one? See my journal!
  11. BBC LIVE by Vladimir9 · · Score: 0

    Thats what happens when you stream live footage. BBC

  12. Good idea... by bahwi · · Score: 4, Funny

    The BBC is under heavy load. Click here to see how slow their website is loading!

    1. Re:Good idea... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      www.bbc.co.uk always seems slow compared to news.bbc.co.uk

      Don't actually see any speed difference here - but thats probably due to the fact I'm going through a webcache and that my ISP has some sort of peering aragement with the bbc

  13. slashdot by WPIDalamar · · Score: 3, Funny

    great, talking about web site slow downs, and then we go slashdot them!

  14. Give credit where credit is due by Mothra+the+III · · Score: 4, Funny

    Where is the term "Slashdot effect" in this article?

    --
    Worst. Sig. Ever.
    1. Re:Give credit where credit is due by MarkGriz · · Score: 1

      Why is Slashdot due any credit? Many people (some who've probably never even heard of Slashdot) go the BBC site to get news.
      Sure, the site is heavily loaded, but I doubt Slashdot had much to do with that.

      --
      Beauty is in the eye of the beerholder.
  15. Ironic... by lilricky · · Score: 0, Redundant

    So the BBC and other news sites are being hammered by millions of web viewers, so what do we do? Slashdot em!! Hehehe

  16. Oh great... by Chicane-UK · · Score: 1

    I was just enjoying the fact that the BBC news site was running suitably fast.. and then it got posted to Slashdot!!

    --
    "Hey! Unless this is a nude love-in, get the hell off my property!!"
  17. Looks good for small sites! by dattaway · · Score: 2, Insightful

    This might be good news for those who wish to take up the slack. The whole internet shouldn't be about several large web sites.

  18. Fourfold!?? by TrevorB · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Let's see. Loading the news.bbc.co.uk from Western Canada, right... now!

    10 seconds to render the whole page. OK, that's been significantly faster than I've been experiencing the last few days, It's been about 30-40 seconds in some instances in the past several days.

    Do try the low graphics version of the BBC, it loads almost instantly, and you can click on "Low Graphics" version while the rest of the page is trying to load.

    CNN does seem significantly better than years ago during major events. They must have tackling the planetary event slashdot effect thing down. But then again, I voted "Any non-us venue" on the poll.. :)

    1. Re:Fourfold!?? by CheeseburgerBlue · · Score: 5, Funny

      The use of the term "fourfold" itself nails the headline as coming from the BBC.

      A more North American slant would have been something pithier like "lots mucher."

      --
      I am from a small, grease-loving country in the north called Ca-na-da.
  19. BBC Website Slows Down by Saggy · · Score: 4, Funny

    In other news, the BBC's website slows down as Slashdot, news for nerds, reports on the BBC reporting about website slow downs...

  20. Let the government provide adequate resources by The+Terrorists · · Score: 1
    Freedom of speech is worthless if people can't access crucial information. 9/11 is a clear example of a time when the internet was central to news distribution.

    If the US government were to provide resources and capacity for crucial websites at times of need, it could also indirectly influence what they say. A win/win situation.

  21. Oh my God! They've slashdotted Bagdhad! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

    You BASTARDS!

  22. Yeah, right... by Eric+Damron · · Score: 2, Funny

    They think it's the war that is causing so many hits but we know that the web site was mentioned on /. and that alone is enough to bring most sites to their knees!

    --
    The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
  23. PENTAGON THREATENS TO KILL INDEPENDENT REPORTERS I by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Interesting

    http://www.gulufuture.com/news/kate_adie030310.htm

  24. Re:Internet hacks? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    As opposed to you, who's obviously fair and balanced...

  25. How ironic... by meringuoid · · Score: 4, Interesting
    ... Slashdot making preparations for traffic spikes. I think we richly deserve to get massacred for days - shall we say ten minutes of downtime for every website we've blasted off the net over the years?

    ISTR that the NYT websute switched to a very graphics-light format in 11 September 2001, in order to cope with the mass traffic. Slashdot is already mostly text, but if necessary it could be lightened a bit. But I imagine the main load is CPU and memory, handling all those database queries and updates, rather than bandwidth; I don't see an easy way of dealing with that short of adding a few more machines. Imagine a... No, I won't :-)

    --
    Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
  26. Too Much by PHAEDRU5 · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    I just spent three weeks in Europe, where I learned that the BBC truly is the Baghdad Broadcasting Corporation. I mean, everything wrong in the world was attributed to the prospect of American "aggression" against Iraq.

    Now the Internet is slow because of American "agression" against Iraq?!?!!?

    Give me a break!

    Pat
    --

    --
    668: Neighbour of the Beast
    1. Re:Too Much by bpfinn · · Score: 1

      Now the Internet is slow because of American "agression" against Iraq?!?!!?

      Americans created the Internet, we should be able to slow it down once in a while. :)

  27. By "US and UK Government Sites Being Hit" by kalidasa · · Score: 1

    what do you mean: they are busy from legitimate traffic, or that they are being DOSed?

  28. Making it worse... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Is this an attempt to make their troubles even worse? Shameful...

  29. My site is ok by ch-chuck · · Score: 2, Funny

    strangely enough, my site about Spacewar (1961 game) on the Altair (1975 computer) got one hit yesterday from usmc.mil.

    --
    try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
    1. Re:My site is ok by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      No link?

    2. Re:My site is ok by superyooser · · Score: 1
      from usmc.mil

      Some navy guy in a submarine is bored out of his mind. :)

  30. Light pages by rednaxel · · Score: 5, Interesting
    This shows the importance of light pages. The wide use of broad band has led many to ignore old guidelines. There's a lot of bloated pages with tons of ill-optimized pics and unnecessary gadgets.

    According this, the average web page is around 90 Kb. Google is a little over 10 Kb.

    --
    If you can read this, thank an english teacher.
    1. Re:Light pages by NerveGas · · Score: 4, Informative


      Actually, the pages probably don't have a whole lot to do with it. Transmition is light. You can saturate a 100 mbit link without much hardware at all.

      The real expense is in the database processing. The cost of performing even a relatively simple SQL query is generally a lot higher than the cost of serving out several large images.

      steve

      --
      Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
    2. Re:Light pages by MikeFM · · Score: 1

      I recently added css to my site to make it look nicer. Including that my home page is less than 3Kb. My average page is less than 5Kb. Only one page is very big and that is because I include several screenshots.. it still is only about 80Kb. The few images I use on my site are mostly redundant and should be reused.. so they shouldn't need to be retransmitted often.

      Really it isn't THAT hard to keep bloat down. Less than 50K for the average page of a commercial site shouldn't be a big deal. I've had several such sites that were considerably less than that and still looked decent and provided good functionality.

      --
      At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
  31. unbelivable.. by odyrithm · · Score: 2, Insightful

    the US putting up a "stars and strips" the UK went in first, they went in with you.. and you have the upmost disguting thought that to put up your flag.. you make me sick!

    --
    moo
    1. Re:unbelivable.. by geekoid · · Score: 1

      the star and stripes went up in the field that the US took, the british we're delayed taking the field they took, due to enemy resistance.

      --
      The Kruger Dunning explains most post on /. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
    2. Re:unbelivable.. by odyrithm · · Score: 1

      even so.. they wouldnt have got there without british backing, hell we where the first in anyway..

      --
      moo
    3. Re:unbelivable.. by Captain+Large+Face · · Score: 1

      It's not about who went in first. The objective of the war is to liberate Iraq, not conquer it, and therefore NO member of the military of ANY country should be raising their country's flag.

    4. Re:unbelivable.. by unitron · · Score: 1

      How about if we come up with a new Iraqi flag, similar enough to the current one to be recognizable as Iraqi, but different enough from the current one to be recognizable as new? Then we could take down the old Iraqi flag, run ours up for a moment and then bring it back down and run up the new one and tell everybody it's the flag of the new Iraq until the new democratic republic of Iraq is up and running and can decide for themselves about a new, "You have just entered a Saddam-free zone" flag.

      --

      I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.

  32. Re:Internet hacks? by filmcritic · · Score: 0

    Okay, so you say it's a GOOD thing that little punks throwing a temper tantrum are doing by breaking the law? What a silly, stupid, asinine thing to say. You speak for 96% of all so-called slashdotters. And oh yes, don't look at a website that simply presents the news, instead, go to a flaming leftist, anti-American site like slashdot or cnn. What intelligence.

  33. Re:God bless Pravda by CheeseburgerBlue · · Score: 1

    Its evident that traffic of those Russian online news services that cover Mideast events completely and effectively will be increasing further.

    Now that's the kind of quality writing I turn to Pravda for. Rock on, you incoherent alarmist bastards!

    --
    I am from a small, grease-loving country in the north called Ca-na-da.
  34. I wonder why they don't use FREENET? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    All that bandwidth they don't have to pay for, is being wasted

  35. Iraq too by GiMP · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Iraq's website, www.uruklink.net, has been inaccessible quite often.. during the few occassions it has been online, it has been terribly slow.

    1. Re:Iraq too by BrookHarty · · Score: 1

      I want to know, how can their site be up? I thought that Internet access was shut down via the UN as part of the trade embargo.

      BTW, Was funny to read Sadam's speechs on that site. The other interesting part was the names of the hospitals and schools, Sadam this, hussein that....

      Also, I should really be using an anon-proxy, all I need is my IP's showing up on their webservers logs.

      -
      you know the world's gone mad when the best rapper is a white guy, the best golfer is a black guy, the Swiss hold the America's Cup, France is accusing the USA of arrogance and the Germans don't want to go to war.

    2. Re:Iraq too by Obfuscant · · Score: 1

      I've found it not too bad. I'm streaming audio from Iraqi radio now. The only problem is there are occasional very loud booming noises. Does anyone know what is wrong?

    3. Re:Iraq too by unitron · · Score: 1

      Don't worry about it. They're just running a sub-woofer test track from a test CD.

      --

      I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.

  36. Re:Internet hacks? by Samari711 · · Score: 1

    i saw something to the same effect scroll across the screen on CNN earlier today. it said something about the targets being US and UK government and buisness sites, can anyone confirm that?

    --

    I never said I was smart, I just said I was smarter than you

  37. DejaVu by L.+VeGas · · Score: 0

    Future BBC Webmaster 1981:
    Girls don't like me because I'm too smart. I'm not gay, damnit!

    BBC Webmaster 2003:
    You can't get to the site because of the war. I'm not gay, damnit!

    --
    Best Windows Freeware
  38. I bet it's because of that last Microsoft patch. by nuwayser · · Score: 1

    We're already thinking about rolling it back. Lots of complaints about slow machines.

    --
    "The cup... the drop... it's a YES!"
  39. Re:Internet hacks? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    (don't check the site, it is WAY biased) now what a hypocritical thing to say...you seem to be trying to post something that's supposed to be unbiased & then throw that in....and then you say it's nice to have people break the law very intelligent of you....

  40. Or alternatively... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    dump these PHP/Perl scripts and just serve html off the disk.

    Migration to this superior system is easy: recursively wget your slow site, and host the wgetted directory.

  41. The BBC is great for other things besides news. by davetrainer · · Score: 2, Interesting
    Certainly I am keeping myself informed of the latest events surrounding the war, but on a lighter note -- I don't know how I would get through the work week without listening Pete Tong's Essential Selection every Friday after lunch, and today the stream halts and has to re-buffer every 30 seconds or so.

    Such are the side effects of outrageously high demand for their news content, I guess.

  42. We all slow down, by Openadvocate · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Some of us choose to have a structure that can handle peak loads in times like this, other choose not to. Of course it costs more money to be able to handle the load, and the hardware will sit idle most of the time. But it is a decision you just need to take. "Do we require that we can display full content at peak times".
    Many sites have prepared for this pressure in the days before, specially when the 48 hour deadline came, another server or two got into the pool in the loadbalancers. :)

    --
    my sig
  43. They call the load a problem? by Malc · · Score: 2, Insightful

    "Keynote Systems, which regularly tests the response times of busy websites, said the responsiveness of BBC News Online suffered during the busy lunchtime period with average download times rising from 0.47 seconds to 1.88 seconds."

    I had their live video feed going for an hour or so this afternoon. It lost about 12% of the packets. Not bad considering the same thing on CNN wouldn't load. I tried to check out the BBC World broadband live feed, but that requires registering for some sort of free (Real??) 14-day pass. No thanks - I'll just go downstairs and watch it on digital cable instead.

  44. Also a problem for places outbound connections by Sabalon · · Score: 3, Interesting

    My boss came to me around the 13th asking what were we gonna do on the 17th if we went to war...basically, how are mission critical apps gonna communicate over our school's internet connection if everyone is streaming video of war coverage?

    Luckily Shock and Awe started after most of our classes were done for the week and Thurs wasn't that bad. I guess with all the Kazaa traffic, streaming web didn't stand a chance :)

    Can't wait for that packetshaper to get here.

  45. Inshallah by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Allah wills the Western infidel Intarnet to be slowed down, as they continue their heathen crusade against the Muslims. Heed His warning before your cities are turned to fire!

  46. A new book? by StarTux · · Score: 2, Funny

    "The Slashdot guide to the Slashdot effect"

    In smaller print:

    Business guide to avoding web slow downs.

    Thought I'd keep my typo/spelling mistake for real effect...

    StarTux

  47. "can of worms" by odyrithm · · Score: 1

    everything seems to be a can of worms with you mr tacho.

    --
    moo
  48. If you're a sysadmin... by Patman · · Score: 4, Informative

    ...especially for a large site, consider deploying something like Squid for times like these.

    Make it transparent most of the time, but on days like today, cache CNN.com, MSNBC.com, Foxnews.com, whatever. Cuts down on bandwidth utilization both for your company and for the target site.

  49. this just in from the BBC by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Apparently Afghanistan has joined the coalition of the willing.

    They couldn't offer much in the way of money or troops, but they did offer the use their large stock of broken promises.

  50. Re:PENTAGON THREATENS by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    My God, what tripe.

  51. Worth noting by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    It could be worth noting that patriotic != pro-war...

  52. Comment removed by account_deleted · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  53. BBC is not FoxNews by The+Ape+With+No+Name · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    Actually, it is the only place you would have heard the fact that Dick Cheney is still on the Halliburton payroll. Halliburton owns Brown & Root who won contracts to rebuild Iraqi infrastructure. Absolutely unreported in the States. Meanwhile, back at the ranch, FoxNews had to admit in court that they fabricate stories. Who to trust?

    --
    Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
    1. Re:BBC is not FoxNews by Leven+Valera · · Score: 1

      Got linkage on that FoxNews/fabrication angle?

      --
      Woot w00t w007.
    2. Re:BBC is not FoxNews by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You know, I find it so deeply sad that people think this way.

      Look, there are strong, valid arguments for the war and strong arguments against the war. I'm still deeply divided about it. But does anyone with two brain cells to rub together really think that Bush wanted an insanely expensive, horribly divisive war because some chain of corporate relations connects Dick Cheney with a company that hopes to profit from rebuilding?

      That sort of grubby conspiracy-mongering is a substitute for thought, and a substitute for the courage to recognize the possible consequences of ones views.

    3. Re:BBC is not FoxNews by Skidge · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Actually, I heard that story on NPR (Cheney/Haliburton/Brown & Root getting govt. contracts) while I was driving home from work last week, so it's not absolutely unreported in the States.

    4. Re:BBC is not FoxNews by The+Ape+With+No+Name · · Score: 1

      It was in the Washington Post print edition. Buried of course. I can't seem to google it as anything with FoxNews in it brings up links to its own stories. The case was in California and a Fox producer had to admit that they fabricate stories.

      --
      Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
    5. Re:BBC is not FoxNews by The+Ape+With+No+Name · · Score: 1

      They are about 3 weeks behind the curve as the Manchester Guardian broke it. Notice it wasn't even mentioned on CNN et al.

      --
      Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
    6. Re:BBC is not FoxNews by The+Ape+With+No+Name · · Score: 1

      The problem with this is that it is not consipiracy mongering. It is objectivity. When the vice-president is still receiving paychecks from a company that will profit mightily from this war one has to ask questions. Get your head out of your ass.

      --
      Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
    7. Re:BBC is not FoxNews by Tarquin+Sidebottom · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I think the point isn't that Bush has started a war just so that Halliburton can get a load of money, it's about why Halliburton got the contract instead of other companies - are they really the best or did they just get it as a favour for Cheney?

    8. Re:BBC is not FoxNews by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0
      Sure, _that_ might be a valid question (although maybe not the most pressing concern of the moment) but did you see the guy's response to me? He 100% does think it's entirely plausible that the war is driven by some complex scheme to make Cheney a few dollars. I mean, if you were president of the US, wouldn't you gamble it all to earn Dick Cheney some bribe money?

      No, I think it's perfectly clear that I didn't misjudge him at all.

    9. Re:BBC is not FoxNews by Matchu · · Score: 1

      Government contracts are given to the contracter who can do the job and submits the lowest bid. It's the law.

    10. Re:BBC is not FoxNews by The+Ape+With+No+Name · · Score: 1

      This administration doesn't care about laws. It is against the law to wage a non-defensive war with out Congress declaring war. Even the Wat Powers Act says this. Ius Fetial! Ius Fetial!

      --
      Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
  54. Re:The BBC is great for other things besides news. by Malc · · Score: 1

    I used to listen to Pete Tong when the OGG feed was available. The best part of the deal is that I can listen to Radio 1's evening programming (when it's better) in the middle of the afternoon here before I go out!

    My packet loss hadn't been that bad. 12% over an hour with up to 5 mins between pauses.

  55. On this topic... by La+Camiseta · · Score: 1

    Are there any links to something describing Slashdot's architecture? Or something describing how they are able to handle the massive loads that our readership does tend to impose :)?

    And how about regarding other web architectures? (PHPNuke, PostNuke, Plone, Zope, Drupal, Tikiwiki, etc.) What has the readership of Slashdot experienced when it comes to creating scalable websites? And are there any suggestions that you may have for designing scalable web sites?

  56. Re:It's for the benefit of the Iraqi people by odyrithm · · Score: 1

    It was caused by the British made vehicles leaking & burning oil.

    heh... no worse than the US gas gusling stiff shifters now are they?

    and take your head out of your ass.. gun ho Americans.. no your not great! you fly about in our "British" made harriers! best fighter jet ever. so kiss my arse.

    --
    moo
  57. Dont pat yourself on the back so soon, Taco! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Internal Server Error
    The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.
    Please contact the server administrator, pater@slashdot.org and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.

    More information about this error may be available in the server error log.

    Apache/1.3.26 Server at slashdot.org Port 80

  58. More and more of my fellow Americans by devphil · · Score: 1


    are watching the BBC video stream. It's much more clear and less "ooooh, shiny tanks!" than the major American newsfeeds. Pulling that stream over the transatlantic channels is always going to be slow.

    A friend of mine told me he's only been watching the Naked News since the war started. Apparently reports of massive explosions, hundreds of tanks, and Iraqi citizens partying in the streets just seems to sound so much clearer when reported by nude people. I'll have to try it.

    --
    You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
  59. emergency web pages? by fermion · · Score: 4, Insightful
    Why is this news. Web pages are so bloated with ads, gratuitous graphics, useless animation, and calls to 10 different servers that set 20 different cookies that they barely meet usability guidelines in normal situations. Given this bloat is acceptable design, it is no wonder that the pages fail under stressful situation. There are a few exceptions to this, /. being one of them. Usually very good response, and apparently a good understanding of bottlenecks that can be removed to improve performance.

    I would reference Home Page Usability in which rule #94 is to have an alternate home page for times of emergency. The New York Times had a successful deployment of such a page on 9/11, and seems to be meeting demand now. I wonder how many others agencies have emergency web pages set up that can better meet demand.

    --
    "She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
    1. Re:emergency web pages? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0
      Seeing as the BBC News Site:

      1. Doesn't contain any ads
      2. Has a low-res text only version
      3. Automatically reduces content volume on request spikes
      4. Is distributed both sides of the Atlantic
      I assume your criticism is targetted elsewhere.
  60. Poor Pater by Noksagt · · Score: 1

    Good to see you guys are handling the traffic well (mostly). Gotten a few 500 Internal Server Errors. Guess you know what being slashdotted is like ;-)

    Seriously--great work so far.

  61. Btw, this is my favorite.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.

    I clicked refresh. ME SO SOWWY!

  62. Tripe? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Nobody equals CNN in spreading tripe...

  63. What's the point... by Metroid72 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Slashdot got slashdotted too: Internal Server Error The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request. Please contact the server administrator, pater@slashdot.org and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error. More information about this error may be available in the server error log. Apache/1.3.26 Server at slashdot.org Port 80

  64. Re:The bias........ by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    and in other biased news Chicago Tribune Admits Patriotic Rallies Bigger Than Appeasement Protests

  65. a force stronger than the slashdot effect by CySurflex · · Score: 3, Funny
    War on Iraq is causing all these web sites to slow down?!?

    Finally a force stronger than the slashdot effect.

  66. Comment removed by account_deleted · · Score: 0, Troll

    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  67. Next/Prev Links - possible high-traffic workaround by MattRog · · Score: 3, Insightful

    It is pretty easy -- make them non-dynamic, something along the lines of:
    <- prev | next ->

    Which points to something like "current_article_url&goto=prev" and "current_article_url&goto=next". That would avoid a database call until you actually click the link (it would translate that into the actual previous and next articles and then show the correct one).

    Of course, you lose a little bit of the dynamic site aspect but if you *really* can't remember what the next article was you can always keep the main page open in a new browser window/tab and refer back to it.

    --

    Thanks,
    --
    Matt
  68. Traffic Burst strategery by Tiro · · Score: 1
    You can also read My journal where I've talked quite a bit about what Slashdot has done in preperation for traffic bursts.
    First tip for avoiding traffic bursts, Mr Taco: avoid linking to yourself.

  69. thanks by Lxy · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Slashdot team:

    I know I'll be unpopular by saying this, but thanks for all the hard work. You guys have a lot of experience handling rediculous loads, so when stuff like this comes around, /. stands firm. While the rest of the internet is slowing to a crawl, I can depend on pretty nice response times from you. On Sept 11, /. was one of the only news sites that was actually responding. When I can't get a TV, I'll be checking /. for war coverage. I know a lot of people are complaining that war isn't "News for Nerds", but it most certainly is news and I'm glad /. has stepped up to the call of duty on this one.

    --

    There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
    :wq
  70. Re:worste post ever. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    why cause it doesn't agree with you? doesn't fit your line of thought?

    well here's something else that will piss you off...poll results on Bush
    Approval Ratings Support the War 72% President's Approval Overall 67% President's Approval on Iraq 65% U.S. Tried Enough Diplomacy 67% Right for U.S. to Attack Now 62% Link

  71. Wow...Another person I agree with. by FirstNoel · · Score: 1

    Fox News...that is the most biased right-winged news company anywhere. I'll watch it just to laugh at the ridiculousness (spelling?, oh the irony).

    I also completely support the troops. The have job to do, even if I don't agree with it. They are good people caught in the middle. The war sucks, I just hope it ends quickly with as few as possible victims.

    Sean D.

    --
    "Hmm. I am to metaphor cheese as metaphor cheese is to transitive verb crackers!"
    1. Re:Wow...Another person I agree with. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You do realise that your fascist leader depends on you saying "Well, now it has started I'll support the troops?"

      He knew very well that all he had to do was start the war and sheep like you would all fall into line and bleat in unison. You make me sick.

  72. Some good info for the saddam supporters by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/world/from_our_own_corr espondent/2058253.stm

  73. what's a goog? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    that is all

  74. No Livestream by golfeninherdecke · · Score: 2, Informative

    The Livestream is really fucked up. But I found a list of Internet-TV stations. But I think there are some other stations.

    --
    http://hausundhof.com
  75. ct /.'s self, fillm at 11 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

    Not Found
    The requested URL /~CmdrTaco/journal/27736 was not found on this server.

    Apache/1.3.22 Server at alterslash.org Port 80

  76. Saddam's plot by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny
    He planned this: he deliberately drove the US into war with Iraq precisely to cause the CNN and BBC websites to get DDOS'd.

    Cunning bastard!

    Currently he is also causing the US huge amounts of economic tricking them into launching multimillion dollar cruise missiles into relatively worthless buildings.

    And Bush fell for it all. Brilliant strategist, that Saddam!

  77. Surf without images. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Some of these crappy "big name" home pages have over 500K of data just to load the single home page! They don't implement proxy controls properly, and use dynamic content like date/time tickers so the damn things can't be cached on my side by Border Manger or other proxys.

    I surf with images disabled and it is AMAZING how much faster things load. If I want an image, I'll load it with right-click menu.

    Kudos to the BBC for their "low bandwidth" option. Now why can't the low bandwidth version be the DEFAULT with a link to the optional "bandwidth pig and flashy crapola version" of the site.

    The concept of the web browser was for the CLIENT to format the content to the CLIENT'S desired presentation as defined by the CLIENT. Nearly everything that has happened in the web since then has violated that basic tenant. Nearly every new "feature" was just another way for the provider to screw up your screen into an unreadable, bandwith wasting mess. How many websites even PRINT normally now without cutting off text or wacked out unreadable formatting? They use tables with fixed-pixel sizes, pictures of words instead of text. Hell, they might as well just post a single giant JPG of the whole page instead of HTML!

  78. Another factor: more streaming by gilesjuk · · Score: 4, Informative

    More people are streaming live news feeds than normal.

  79. From Arab News, Saudi Arabia by kevinank · · Score: 0, Interesting
    The new totalitarian regime prevailing in America and taking hold in its satellites around the world has learned important lessons from the failed experiments of the past. The first of these lessons is that the greatest liability to the survival of a regime is a strong and erratic leader ...

    Thus without Hitler's deranged ambitions, the Third Reich might really have lasted a thousand years. Similarly, if Stalin had kept his genocidal ambitions in check, the Soviet Union might have continued to enjoy its initial popularity among sections of the West and at home.

    With these examples in mind, the leader has been eliminated as a factor in U.S. politics. George W. Bush's very nullity as a politician throws into relief the fact that the United States has long been governed, not by its people, but by interests that are happy to remain largely anonymous, do not rely on individuals for their hold on power, and are recognizable in public mainly by a soothing corporate blue.

    Americans often seem baffled that others fail to admire their system of government. They know after all that in the United States there exists a lively culture of debate, where the whole lunatic spectrum of opinion can find a platform of one kind or another (though at the same time the difference between the political parties it is actually possible to elect is vanishingly small) ...

    They have a vibrant and largely unchecked artistic community. They have the First Amendment ...

    The reason for all this is that the new totalitarianism has learned a second lesson from its heavy-handed predecessors. If artists and intellectuals were able to do precisely nothing about Hitler or Stalin or any of the legion of tin-pot dictators around the world, it follows that you might as well have freedom of expression.

    In the new totalitarian system, people can say whatever they like, and it makes absolutely no difference.

    The impending war on Iraq is only one example among many of a supposedly sovereign public completely powerless in the face of a government bent on a course of action ...

    The most important lesson to the new totalitarianism, then, comes from ancient Rome, and is simply that people sufficiently supplied with bread and games will put up with anything.

    --
    LibBT: BitTorrent for C - small - fast - clean (Now Versio
    1. Re:From Arab News, Saudi Arabia by mshiltonj · · Score: 1

      Did you write that? It seems pretty good to be an off-the-cuff /. post. Do you have a url for the original?

      --
      Software Wars
    2. Re:From Arab News, Saudi Arabia by kevinank · · Score: 1

      I grabbed it off of Salon. No idea why it got scored down as offtopic though -- the whole question of the original post was about alternate news sources. Unbiased coverage of this war is unlikely to be found. The best I hope for is to understand what bias a reporter comes with.

      --
      LibBT: BitTorrent for C - small - fast - clean (Now Versio
    3. Re:From Arab News, Saudi Arabia by mshiltonj · · Score: 1

      I think this may be the original. It has more text than what you posted. Maybe you got the 'edited' version? Couldn't read salon -- I have no subscription.

      FWIW, I really like Drudge Report. He tends to sensationalize his headlines, but he gets stories quickly, and he uses a good share of international, non-US news links.

      --
      Software Wars
    4. Re:From Arab News, Saudi Arabia by kevinank · · Score: 1

      The story on Salon was a collection of foreign news reports, each shortened to four or five paragraphs. Curiously enough that particular story has been removed and replaced with one from the United Arab Emirates which is considerably more volatile. Also from the list is Der Spiegel's opinion piece on US Imperialism (roughly summarized as the bigger they are, the harder they fall.)

      --
      LibBT: BitTorrent for C - small - fast - clean (Now Versio
    5. Re:From Arab News, Saudi Arabia by kevinank · · Score: 1

      To the moderators: Look, this isn't off topic (it is News from an alternative source, which is after all the discussion topic), and it isn't flamebait (flamebait draws flames; no flames here, just comments.) Cutting down a post because you don't agree with it is bull.

      --
      LibBT: BitTorrent for C - small - fast - clean (Now Versio
  80. Re:It's for the benefit of the Iraqi people by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    heh... no worse than the US gas gusling stiff shifters now are they?

    1) US cars get better gas mileage than British cars. If the shifters are too stiff for you, I suggest you go to a gym and get some exercise.

    2) British automakers had to be bought out by American manufacturers to keep them from going out of business. One example, the quality of Jaguar vehicles, while still very low, improved by an order of magnitude since Ford bought them.

    "British" made harriers! best fighter jet ever.

    Harriers are pieces of shit.

    BTW, "gusling?", "no your not great?", obviously British schools are a joke even compared to the American schools.

    Just go back to your mom's basement with your well earned inferiority complex and go keep watching your German paedo scat porn?

  81. It slows down? Big woop! by aengblom · · Score: 1

    The story to me seems the opposite. Web sites are handling this quite well. The BBC is WFM currently. No big slowdown.

    More to the point, both NY Times and WashingtonPost.com are serving huge images on their home page. MSNBC, FOXNEWS and CNN also seem to have no problem keeping up with my broadband connection.

    And they have been quite responsive.

    They are even serving up video and audio.

    Seem prepared to me.

    --


    So close and yet so far from the world's perfect ID number
  82. Comment removed by account_deleted · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  83. Re:Another factor: more streaming-Realvideo. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    That reminds me. The new RealVideo codecs have been out for awhile, and there is a noticable difference.

  84. Other speed considerations as well? by scrotch · · Score: 1

    Just to be curious, I saved the code from the journal page to look at it. I removed all the duplicate spaces, blank lines and tabs and it shrunk around 900 bytes (28,313 => 27,403 total).

    I would imagine that a much longer page (like this one) would reap a larger benefit from a little bit of template clean up. Do you think this would help? do you think it makes sense? I mean, it seems like you could be saving a few k on every page load.

    Or does reality not work like that? Wouldn't be the first time today I was way off on some math.

  85. Re:worste post ever. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    It seems then you are basing your objection's against Bush on the idea that there are no "WMD"'s ?

    In that case, if ANY WMD's are found, where should we find your personal "100%" mea culpa?

  86. see bbc's own website stats by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    If you want to see oodles of stats about the BBC's own website, take a gander at http://support.bbc.co.uk/support

    Lots of mrtg graphs, response times, uptimes etc. Even a webcam of the support team :-)

    1. Re:see bbc's own website stats by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I think that this one is the most interesting one. Peak Output 1.9 GBits/Sec , and you can see the gulf war effect as the peaks slowly increase from Jan thru Feb to March.

  87. Sorry, left it at HTML format. by Moloch666 · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    Sorry about the previous post. I learned these when I was like 8 and still can say them pretty good. How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck would chuck wood? A woodchuck would chuck as much wood as a woodchuck would chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood. I thought a thought, but the thought I wasn't the thought I thought. If the thought I thought was the thought I thought, I wouldn't have thought such a thought. They are much harder to type than say.

    --
    Understanding is a three-edged sword. -- Kosh Naranek
    1. Re:Sorry, left it at HTML format. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I surrender. It's been a long day!!!

  88. Re:The BBC is great for other things besides news. by Tarquin+Sidebottom · · Score: 1

    Radio1 dance music? uggghh, shoot me. BBC 6Music any day of the week...

  89. DOS attacks on financial sites by Space+cowboy · · Score: 4, Interesting

    We host a fair few (60 or so) financial-orientated websites, with an average query-level of some 10-20 queries per second on the database supporting those sites.

    We have an 8-way cluster of machines to support this (way-overkill for the most part) but recently, we've been (almost) hitting limits... The apache service has logged peaks of 1000 connections/second, with the DB query-level going as high as 70,000/second....

    I'm actually fairly happy that the system can more-or-less cope with the load, but nonetheless, I want to make sure (or at least as-sure-as-possible) that we can't be easily DOS'd, so this weekend I'll be writing an Apache module to monitor the number-of-connections-per-second on an IP-by-IP basis, and take a decision to run a script depending on thresholds....

    I think stateful firewalls could probably manage it but for historical reasons we're stuck with what we have, and having apache call a bandwidth-limiting script on an IP address that's registered 5000 hits in the last minute (for example) seems reasonable :-)

    If there's something that can do this already, I'd like to know - I've found (ntal), but running a script per packet doesn't appeal :-( I prefer the idea of hitting a limit in Apache that triggers a script that limits access (dynamic firewalls)

    Ideas gratefully received :-)

    Simon

    --
    Physicists get Hadrons!
  90. Cache it. by Upright+Joe · · Score: 1

    Well, first off, I don't see the big deal about the BBC's load time going from .47 seconds to 1.88 seconds. It seems to me like they're doing just fine.

    I know CNN used akamai for a little while because I remember seing the old ARL's on their images. We use akamai at the company I work for and I can't rave enough about their services. Our site peaked last year at 320mbit per second. It was right around 144GB in one hour. Thanks to akamai, we served that without so much as a hiccup. It was dished out from a cluster of 5 aging solaris boxen.

  91. Re:worste post ever. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    should that also include weapons banned by the UN that he's not supposed to have?

  92. Re:The bias........ by pmz · · Score: 1

    And about the bised part, where i am, every 30 minutes, a big cross goes on the screen telling us to pray to god for the sake of our solders.

    Along with Saddam's countdown to death and the alert-o-meter, I think everyone knows by now that Fox News is a piece of crap. Fox News is more like Hard Copy than CNN, and even CNN is pushing the limits of good taste.

    --
    Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
  93. The big news sites... by meme_police · · Score: 1

    ...really had plenty of time to gear up for the war. When 9/11 hit our sites were down for hours and overwhelmed for days even after we started publishing static pages.

    --

    The meme police, They live inside of my head

  94. Missing The Winter Music Conference by szyzyg · · Score: 2, Funny

    I can't tune into BBC Radio 1 at their yearly DJ party in Miami... the Real Audio server is just too loaded.

    Dammit some of us are interested in *real* news.
    All I care about is the weapons of mass dancing that the DJ's are going to be showing off.

  95. not using spell-check won't make the site faster by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    not to nit-pick, but don't you guys do this for a living? god... take some pride in your work. i mean jeez - "preperation?"

  96. fuck keynote by technoendo · · Score: 1

    All I can say is, don't rely on any keynote reports. It is purely a pointy-clickey graphy output for managerial types to analyze stuff whether or not the underlying data is accurate. I have nothing more than contempt for keynote studies. More than once they proved that their tests were faulty (different OS's, hardware etc used in a test where people are to assume that everything is the same). If you are a non-technical manager or exec within a company feel free to argue at length, but if you are an engineer you will hate these fucks for undermining the technical realities.

  97. Re:Another factor: more streaming-Realvideo. by unitron · · Score: 1
    "The new RealVideo [realnetworks.com] codecs have been out for awhile, and there is a noticable difference."

    For better or for worse?

    --

    I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.

  98. Re:The bias........ by unitron · · Score: 1
    "...every 30 minutes, a big cross goes on the screen telling us to pray to god for the sake of our solders."

    But only for our Christian soldiers, right? The rest are on their own?

    Speaking of prayer, they just had the guy in the mosque tower giving the call to prayer in Baghdad. I would have thought that the sound of U.S. ordinance would have had that covered already.

    Hope we missed as many civilian targets as possible.

    --

    I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.

  99. Re:PENTAGON THREATENSTO KILL INDEPENDENTREPORTERS by unitron · · Score: 1

    Does the Pentagon know that Al Franken has the patent on that gag?

    --

    I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.

  100. Re:Another factor: more streaming-Realvideo. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    "For better or for worse?"

    *laugh*
    IMHO for better. You'll enjoy it even better if you have broadband.

  101. Bullshit! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0
    Keynote Systems claims...
    However, Government sites in both the US and the UK are being hit, with the US Army site taking over 80 seconds to load at peak times.

    This is total bullshit. Keynote Systems was performing DoS attacks themselves on the sites and then reporting it as a slowdown. Just try and /. the Army Home Page and see what happens. There aren't enough users in the /. community to make a dent in it. Don't believe me? Try it.

  102. Re:worste post ever. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Why are people acting like it's really hard for the US to plant evidence? Look at which nation has the most WMD in the world.

  103. Re:The bias........ by superyooser · · Score: 1
    But only for our Christian soldiers, right? The rest are on their own?

    C'mon, you know that's not true. We pray for ALL the coalition troops. That includes the thousands of Muslims in the U.S. military. I pray also for Iraq's downtrodden, ragtag troops, who are forced to fight for Saddam.

    Hope we missed as many civilian targets as possible.

    I hope we didn't miss any! We drop bombs on military targets, but food and supplies on civilian targets.

  104. Re:The bias........ by unitron · · Score: 1
    Let's just say that I'm really uncomfortable with even the "fairly unbalanced" news channel affiliating itself with any one religion.

    If they ran that same spot with a Star of David or the Islamic Crescent symbol instead of a cross, imagine all the flack they'd catch.

    Let me amend my previous statement. I hope our bombs don't hurt any people ('cept maybe that little Stalin wannabe and those who share in his guilt), but that they do such a scary job on a bunch of replaceable buildings (as opposed to ancient sites of great archeological interest) that all the humans realize that right now would be a really good time to surrender and tell our troops where Saddam and company are hiding or to where they have run off.

    --

    I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.

  105. Comment removed by account_deleted · · Score: 1

    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  106. Re:The bias........ by filmcritic · · Score: 0

    I think you need to stop hitting that pipe sonny boy...there never has been a cross on Fox News and notices to pray for the soldiers. You're almost at the same level as that ridiculous information manager in Iraq stating the Iraqi army killed 5 US tanks and have driven all enemies backwards.

    It's amazing how this "horribly biased" news organization is continually number 1 in cable news, FAR surpassing CNN and MSNBC. Seems as though Americans have had it with the stream of bullshit eminating from the major networks and the pile of steaming vomit from CNN. Argue until you can't breathe anymore but Nielsen ratings are pretty hard to fake. Fox is #1 for a reason.

  107. Iraq News fast loading pages by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0


    These pages were coming up fast for me and they've been very useful:
    Iraq News - http://www.HavenWorks.com/world/iraq
    & Search Iraq new

  108. It's the French by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0


    http://www.fuckfrance.com/
    http://www.boycottfr ance.com/
    http://www.frogweenies.com/
    http://www .francesucks.com/

  109. They don't make them like they used to... by C+A+S+S+I+E+L · · Score: 1

    After all, as I recall there were absolutely no reported problems with web sites' performance during the last Gulf War.

  110. Re:worste post ever. by James_Duncan8181 · · Score: 1

    The golf war? They really shouldn't have let those WWE commentators on the US Open...

    --
    "To any truly impartial person, it would be obvious that I am right."
  111. BBC's political stand contributes to traffic by romit_icarus · · Score: 1

    I don't know about the rest of you, but CNN is getting a bad rap for toeing the official US line. a part of BBC's increase in traffic can be seen as the rise of anti-US sentiment

  112. Re:The bias........ by jez9999 · · Score: 1

    Fox is #1 for a reason.

    Yep. It caters for the selfish, uncaring, xenophobic, moronic evil bit that lurks inside every person. It allows the people of America to secretly indulge their hate for just about anything - the outside world, rich people, poor people, black people, white people - under the veil of 'watching news'.

    --
    == Jez ==
    Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
  113. MOD DOWN -1 TROLL by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    n/t

  114. Last Post! by alpg · · Score: 0

    The temperature of Heaven can be rather accurately computed from available
    data. Our authority is Isaiah 30:26, "Moreover, the light of the Moon
    shall be as the light of the Sun and the light of the Sun shall be sevenfold,
    as the light of seven days." Thus Heaven receives from the Moon as much
    radiation as we do from the Sun, and in addition seven times seven (49) times
    as much as the Earth does from the Sun, or fifty times in all. The light we
    receive from the Moon is one ten-thousandth of the light we receive from the
    Sun, so we can ignore that. With these data we can compute the temperature
    of Heaven. The radiation falling on Heaven will heat it to the point where
    the heat lost by radiation is just equal to the heat received by radiation,
    i.e., Heaven loses fifty times as much heat as the Earth by radiation. Using
    the Stefan-Boltzmann law for radiation, (H/E)^4 = 50, where E is the absolute
    temperature of the earth (~300K), gives H as 798K (525C). The exact
    temperature of Hell cannot be computed, but it must be less than 444.6C, the
    temperature at which brimstone or sulphur changes from a liquid to a gas.
    Revelations 21:8 says "But the fearful, and unbelieving ... shall have their
    part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone." A lake of molten
    brimstone means that its temperature must be at or below the boiling point,
    or 444.6C (Above this point it would be a vapor, not a lake.) We have,
    then, that Heaven, at 525C is hotter than Hell at 445C.
    -- "Applied Optics", vol. 11, A14, 1972

    - this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...