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.
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!
Where is the term "Slashdot effect" in this article?
Worst. Sig. Ever.
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...
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.
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.
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
...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.
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
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.
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
More people are streaming live news feeds than normal.
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
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!