Slashdot Mirror
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.)
What should sites like this do?
Do they need to spend to cope with once yearly spikes in traffic or just let the sites fall over - which in itself creates a 'story' and free advertising.
It seems with most 'big' news online there is always a secondary story regarding the number of visits to the website, and usually the event is seen as bigger if the webservers crash and burn under the load...
Even with the help of Akamai (I presume) the keynote quicktime stream was problematic. I couldn't watch it without frames dropping and sound going away. Time outs were often... a real pain. Increasing the buffer, using TCP instead of UDP did not help either.
If I remember correctly it wasn't like this last year... I guess Apple created a lot of buzz this time.
I was told (by someone who should know) that Apple only has the images Akamaized, and they always serve the html themselves. They really did have a heck of a bottleneck in there.
Lea
Let me set the Reality Distortion Field straight for you... two months from now, Apple will release Tiger and then you'll send $140 to get that. So that's 60 bucks tacked on to the cost right there!
1.) How many servers does Apple have load balancing their front end? 2.) How many servers does the MWSF have on their front end? Microsoft's own site is one of the heaviest hit sites around, has thousands of attempted attacks and plenty of people trying to DOS it, but it still continues to run rather well.
And it's probably more cost effective to lose some impulse buys the day a shiny new product is announced than it is to spend many hundreds of thousands of dollars on beefing up the website to cope with traffic levels that it only gets for one day per year. Assuming they make $100 margin on the Mac Mini, they'd need to sell an awful lot of impulse buys to impatient people to justify spending $1 million on the site.
Here's a Register article from '02 talking about a paper from '00 from MS which discusses the FreeBSD/Solaris -> Win2K transition of Hotmail that you might find interesting.
Hotmail was purchased by MS ('97) and run for several years (transition started in 2k) before making the transition.
Infact, here's a slashdot article on just that topic.
~Lake
>>With a SuperDrive, Bluetooth 2.0 + Airport Extreme, 512MB RAM (will probably crack open and put in a 1GB module), an 80GB drive, and .Mac (for antivirus and etc.) it came to $999.98. I was *expecting* it to be around $1k and I think the price is right.
:)
A few months ago, I bought a refurb 1GHz iBook G4 from the Apple Store for $799. Added a 512MB RAM chip ($100) and an Airport Extreme card ($79). It doesn't have the 80GB drive or Bluetooth or the SuperDrive or DVI out, but of course it is portable, runs on battery, has built-in kb/trackpad and has a 12" LCD
I have thought that the iBook G4 was pretty much ALREADY the "iCheap" and IMHO the two machines discussed here are roughly equivalent. Note that BT and DVD burning and a bigger HD are all available on higher-end iBooks.
The design of the mini is fairly simple actually... deep-six the screen, battery, trackpad, and kb from the iBook. Rotate 90 degrees to put the ports on the back and move the optical drive on top of what's left. BINGO there's the mini. It's just an iBook, folks.