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.
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
Shameless plug for your journal to get us to read it? ;)
SuDZ
since you just slashdot it...
[self dealloc];
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.
Curiously enough, Pravda also has a story on the subject.
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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
They run the whole thing off of a Sun Blade 500MHz with 2GB RAM.
Pretty cool actually.
"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!
The BBC is under heavy load. Click here to see how slow their website is loading!
great, talking about web site slow downs, and then we go slashdot them!
Where is the term "Slashdot effect" in this article?
Worst. Sig. Ever.
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!!"
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.
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..
In other news, the BBC's website slows down as Slashdot, news for nerds, reports on the BBC reporting about website slow downs...
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.
You BASTARDS!
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!
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.
what do you mean: they are busy from legitimate traffic, or that they are being DOSed?
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); }
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.
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
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.
Iraq's website, www.uruklink.net, has been inaccessible quite often.. during the few occassions it has been online, it has been terribly slow.
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
We're already thinking about rolling it back. Lots of complaints about slow machines.
"The cup... the drop... it's a YES!"
Such are the side effects of outrageously high demand for their news content, I guess.
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
"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.
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.
"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
everything seems to be a can of worms with you mr tacho.
moo
...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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
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?
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.
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
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)
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
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.
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
Finally a force stronger than the slashdot effect.
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
Slashdot team:
/. 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.
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,
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
Got linkage on that FoxNews/fabrication angle?
Woot w00t w007.
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!"
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
Not Found /~CmdrTaco/journal/27736 was not found on this server.
The requested URL
Apache/1.3.22 Server at alterslash.org Port 80
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!
More people are streaming live news feeds than normal.
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.
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
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
That reminds me. The new RealVideo codecs have been out for awhile, and there is a noticable difference.
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.
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.
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
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.
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?
Radio1 dance music? uggghh, shoot me. BBC 6Music any day of the week...
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.
:-)
:-( I prefer the idea of hitting a limit in Apache that triggers a script that limits access (dynamic firewalls)
:-)
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
Ideas gratefully received
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
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
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.
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
...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
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
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.
Government contracts are given to the contracter who can do the job and submits the lowest bid. It's the law.
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
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
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.
For better or for worse?
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Comment removed based on user account deletion
After all, as I recall there were absolutely no reported problems with web sites' performance during the last Gulf War.
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.
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."
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
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.