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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.
The apple.com website is mirrored worldwide by Akamai which uses over 2,000 Linux servers, so I don't think you derive much insight about Mac OS X from the sites relative performance yesterday.
I went back a couple hours later and I could add one to my cart, but couldn't complete the transaction.
Hours after that, my "impulsiveness" subsided and I have re-thought if I really want to spend that money.
So it looks like Apple may have lost a sale due to an inadequate web server.
Sam
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.
To prove a point, Jobs had Apple's sites all run in a single Mac Mini. iTunes has been running on a daisy chain of seven iPod Shuffles.
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
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/
Actually, Apple reneged and decided to make the presentation available, just not live.
Here is where you can watch it. QuickTime and streaming access to the Internet required.
Vos teneo officium eram periculosus ut vos recipero is.
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....
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...
>>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.
The probelm that this is standard for mac world expo. High bandwidth high loads are the norm. Normally they stream that keynote live to thousands.
This year they didn't want to due to bandwidth restrictions, and they still went down. What idiot put that system into place? Even without the OS debate. Somebody really screwed up.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
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.
:)
Yea, and i'm sure the fact that author linked Macworld Expo site from a slashdot article just a *pure coincidence*
Heavy bandwidth usage tends to be a very normal occurrence on fansites at any rate. For a while now, Apple Rumors and MacNN switch to low-bandwidth versions during the keynote, and even these sites were swamped.
MacRumors was pretty much down after iWork was announced.
MacNN had a 403 between when iDVD was discussed and when the Mac Mini was mentioned.
Mac Teens performed the best, but started to get intermittent towards the end (probably due to a cascade effect of people fleeing from one working site to another)
Engadget was fairly unreliable, but a little better off than MacNN.
OK, so there was a single server hosting macworld's site, and Apple have 1000 xserves behind some load balancers?
I mean come on people. How much *money* you spend on your net infrastructure dictates how well it will
survive.
Apple spent enough, Macworld didn't. Get over it. Why is this a story?
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.
Just think about it for a minute:
:)
*Apple* MacWorld event almost killed *Microsoft* Windows Server 2003-based site.
Mwa-ha-ha!
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.
If somebody doesn't make a Netcraft joke soon I'll just die.
If you could be anything you want, I'll bet you'd be disappointed.
You were going to buy a switch AND an extra keyboard and mouse? I call shenanigans!
Mac mini: $499
1GB PC2700 DDR from Pricewatch: $85
Keyboard & Mouse )Use the USB keyboard and mouse you already are using as you post on Slashdot with your crappola PC): $0
Bluetooth (as if you actually need it): $50 (less if you buy a USB Bluetooth after-market solution)
Throw in 802.11g for $79, and that gets you up to $663. Shipping is currently free.
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
Let me ask you something, Timothy. Why do you think Apple used Win2003 at MacExpo, instead of plugging in a couple of their magical little OS/X based servers?
Obviously someone at Apple decided Win2003 was a better tool for the job.
Yes. How stupid can you get? IDC runs and promotes the expo not Apple.
Someone at IDC decided that Windows 2003 was the way to go to host their entire website, not just the MacWorld portion.
Want proof?
Registrant:
International Data Group, Inc. (DOM-373425)
5 Speen Street Framingham MA 01701 US
Domain Name: macworldexpo.com
Registrar Name: Markmonitor.com
Registrar Whois: whois.markmonitor.com
Registrar Homepage: http://www.markmonitor.com
Administrative Contact:
International Data Group, Inc. (NIC-14208833) International Data Group, Inc.
5 Speen Street Framingham MA 01701 US
legal@idg.com +1.5089354686 Fax- +1.5084244807
Technical Contact, Zone Contact:
Donna Moschella (NIC-14208849) IDG World Expo Corp.
3 Speen Street Framingham MA 01701 US
donna_moschella@idg.com +1.5084244801 Fax- -
Microsoft.com only gets brought to its knees by virus-infected zombie computers because no person cares when Microsoft announces something new. Apple.com was slowed down by humans beings requesting information from it and store.apple.com was unable to cope with the demand of people trying to buy Apple's products.
And Macworld isn't run by Apple (it's by IDG), so Apple doesn't have any say in what server macworld.com runs on. Obviously, IDG made a wrong decision when designing their web server system. I'll leave it up to them to decide what it was.
mbbac
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
How does this kind of crap getting modded up to +5?! Amazing.
I recall years ago having a 450 MHz AMD K6-2 LINUX box with 128 MB of RAM consistently beating out a 900 MHz Athlon with 768 MB of RAM (running Windows) when it came to downloads over my broadband connection.
Quite the scientific study you did there. Case closed on the case of the kludge TCP/IP stack! This has nothing to do with served content from Apache versus IIS 6 running on hardware designed to serve content. Lets instead ask the important questions, like how much hardware is backing each site up? How many requests was each site receiving, and how much content was it serving for those requests? How much hardware does each site have backing it up? I'll bet that macworldexpo didn't have Akamai and their 3000 linux servers mirroring content like apple.com does. Microsoft runs Windows 2003 and IIS 6, and their web servers didn't choke while serving 100meg downloads of XP SP2 to how many millions of machines?
I might also point out that Hotmail for a time (and may very well still be) was using FreeBSD for its DNS servers... that's because when MS tried using their own "dogfood" (Windows 2000), it keeled over.
Maybe you should do a little fact checking before randomly repeating something you think you remember hearing something about.
Hotmail used a BSD variant and Apache before they were purchased by Microsoft in 1998. Since then they have moved over to Windows and IIS. As it took a while to switch over the entire production enviroment, the Microsoft runs Apache jokes surfaced. Hotmail also went from a subsrciption base of 9 million in 1998 to over 100 million in 2001 while they switched over. Microsoft fun "facts" regarding Hotmail
XP has some serious flaws, but Server 2003 is a pretty strong OS, and IIS 6 is rock solid compared to IIS 5 and even Apache. More Linkage
thousands?
Try millions...
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.
This will be the first Mac I've owned. I've been looking at the platform since OS X and recently evaluated the new iMac and 17" PowerBook. The Mac mini is exactly what I was looking for - a low cost entry-level system. All the Unix goodness with a nice interface. If the platform works for me (for development), then I'll pop for a 17" G5 PowerBook when they roll out.
MacWorldExpo.com is dead.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
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.
Can someone explain why it costs $425 to upgrade to 1Gb RAM from apple?
Multiple reasons reasons:
1. Vendors hate keeping RAM in inventory, because prices fluctuate so madly.
2. You are paying them to install it.
3. They are trying to compell power users to just buy a beefier system.
4. Apple has always gouged the users on memory upgrades. It's good for their profit margins. Some people would rather pay too much for extra memory than install it themselves.
I'm upgrading mine myself. Warrenty, schmarrenty. I've broght hideously-tweaked boxes into the Apple Store before, and they've never so much as batted an eye about helping me with the part that's actually broken, so long as my mods are not likely to be what broke it.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Well, with the notion of Mac users bringing down the site, it seems we help with Slashdotting it. Its like a good DDoS attack. :-P