Slashdot Mirror
BBC on Website Slow Downs
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.
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.
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.
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.
...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.
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.
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The internet is the greatest source of biased information in the history of mankind.
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
More people are streaming live news feeds than normal.
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?)
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.