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