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MacWorld Expo Traffic Analysis
Bioanarchism writes "MacWorld Expo has been the receiving end of the brute force of the Internet surfers. Netcraft also reports on the Internet traffic that other Apple websites have gotten since Steve Jobs gave the opening keynote." The Windows Server 2003-based MacWorld Expo site folded under all those hits, while Apple's sites, running Mac OS X, were only knocked into sluggishness. (Server load is a complex thing, of course -- more complicated than what OS is on the servers.)
After all, the servers were down for a good period of time during the speech. I know I couldn't get on www.apple.com
I don't know what site you were looking at, but the Apple Store was certainly out of action for the best part of yesterday.
>(Server load is a complex thing, of course -- more complicated than what OS is on the servers.)
So why present it in such a flamebaiting way?
---- Take the Space Quiz!
It doesn't really seem fair to compare the servers for the conference with Apple's corporate website. I'd expect a corporate website to be able to cope with huge loads, whatever OS it's running.
It may be a "complex thing". However, there is a very simple statistic (that is, # of hits on each site) which the posting leaves out.
This is the modern "complexity" diversion tactic: "It looks like Y causes X. However, X is very complex."
This causes the reader, ideally, to forget about the idea of finding other simple causes of X. For shame.
Server load is a complex thing, of course -- more complicated than what OS is on the servers.
Then why did you bring it up and only mention what servers they were running?
+1 Insightful, -1 Troll. What can I say, I'm an Insightful Troll.
If by "only knocked into sluggishness" you mean "dropping 80% of the HTTP requests sent to it, making the site unusable for commerce", then sure, apple's store held up just fine.
What did you eat today? http://www.atetoday.com/
The Windows Server 2003-based Macworld Expo site folded under all those hits, while Apple's sites, running Mac OS X, were only knocked into sluggishness. (Server load is a complex thing, of course -- more complicated than what OS is on the servers.)
So why even mention it?
Not trying to be an MS apologist, but it's not as if the Macworld Expo site has any where near the hosting capability that apple.com does. Probably one, maybe two servers running the expo site.
Yet another MS hater having to spread his FUD with implied meanings....
The real question is why the submitter had to act like there was some other reason for the difference. Oh yeah, unless you bend over backward and consider all software equal, or everything inferior to M$, you are a Zealot.
Sorry, but reality is not always what the Microsoft PR department wants. The Netcraft people did not mince words.
What happens when hordes of Mac enthusiasts stress-test Apple and Microsoft products in head-to-head performance? ... Mac OS X, experienced some slowdowns but was largely available. Apple's online store (also on Mac OS X) struggled, however, experiencing outages and lengthy response times. Faring even worse was the official site for MacWorld Expo, which runs on Windows Server 2003, and was offline for hours following the show's keynote address by Apple CEO Steve Jobs.
The graphs show the thing off line all day.
There are a lot of things that are more complicated than your choice of OS, but we should not ignore the larger trends when looking at smaller details. Microsoft uptimes and security are lower than anyone else's and the average user experience will be poor. The exceptions simply prove the rule by surprising us.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Because that's all they knew and all they could say. OSX up, OSX up and sluggish, M$ down all day. That's the news, and it's a common story.
Worms are another complex and common story.
Microsoft competitors software not working on Microsoft OS are another complex and common story.
BSA raids are another complex and common story.
When you look into the details of these complex stories you usually find something unflattering to Microsoft. Microsoft uptimes are low and in some cases reboot is enforced by the OS every 14 days. 90% of all spam originates from worm infested M$ OS. Microsoft's anti competitive behavior was detailed and documented in weeks of testimony by industry leaders during the anti-turst trials. The BSA encourages disgruntled employees to slander employers, so that raids can be conducted. In all of these things, M$ PR has slick answers. Every now and then we find an exception, so cautious people hold their tongue (sometimes in cheek, as Netcraft's quote of PaidContent, which flattered M$) when they don't know.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I think Apple's products are third rate. OS/X only LOOKS like a powerful mature operating system. On the inside it's as ugly and kludgy as linux.
Yeah, because I care about what's inside. It works great, it looks great, it's easy to configure, it runs reasonably fast, it has few known security problems, let me just throw it all away if the code is a mess of kludgyness.
Last I checked, that's something Apple programmers have to deal with, not me. Even if it were entirely open source, I still wouldn't care.
Random and weird software I've written.
I do 95% of my programming at work on MS Windows systems, and after watching the Mac Expo, I think it would be a real joy to come home and use a Mac. While I am not a Steve groupie, I have to say that the guy is 1,000x more "cool" then Bill G was during the CES show MS did. Bill was so stiff and dry, now I know why MS brought in that late night talk show host, to try to bring some life to the show. Bill G. made the keynote as exiting to watch as paint drying.
In contrast, Steve was cracking jokes and made watching actually fun. Steve had a small systems glitch, just like Bill/MS did. However, Steve paused for a moment, and then said, "this is why we have backups", flipped a KVM switch and had another Mac ready to roll in on second, and the show went on smooth-as-silk.
The demos were actually very good, and I was surprised to see Steve do them all, well except for the Pages demo. Bill's demo of the new media center was _very_ boring, and when the remote didn't work, they had no backup system and just "moved along", the same thing happened when their XBox blue-screened. Come on MS, get a little style and maybe next time take a tip from Apple and have a backup system.
I am looking forward to the Mac Mini and iLife 05. The only thing I wish the Mac Mini had was more video memory. 32MB is a little low for todays standards and it doesn't look like you can upgrade the video. Other then that, it looks like a great system. Maybe the Mac Mini can hook my wife on Apple and she won't complain when I try to buy a G5 box. ; P
If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land,
it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. -James Madison
what's OS/X? some new IBM thing?
no.. they will do the same thing that they did with panther. People who bought a mac recently will get it for 20$
The TCP/IP stack is/was based largely on BSD. You can do strings on some of the networking bins and see the BSD taglines. Of course, this may have changed with Windows 2003.
The statement that Windows has an inferior TCP/IP stack is just as absurd and implying that the MacWorld site went down because it ran Windows, despite the fact that we know nothing of its infrastructure.
It's a story because we can all talk about how our favorite operating system could handle infinite load as if we had any experience in the matter!
Are you sure?
Here are tons of people, myself included, telling you that Apple.com was not reachable. And here is you - one guy who got in but knows "for an absolute fact" that the site was good. Should we believe one person's experience or what the rest of the us actually experienced?
I know this is common for Slashdot readers but next time, please try to be less arrogant.