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.

Comments

Put a proxy-cache in front of it.

[iturbide]

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.

Looks good for small sites!

[dattaway]

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.

unbelivable..

[odyrithm]

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!

We all slow down,

[Openadvocate]

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. :)

They call the load a problem?

[Malc]

"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.

emergency web pages?

[fermion]

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.

Next/Prev Links - possible high-traffic workaround

[MattRog]

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

[Lxy]

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.

Re:Hmmm...

[Photon Ghoul]

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