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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.)
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.
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.
www.apple.com was up, reachable, and quick during the ENTIRE keynote. store.apple.com was "closed".
After the keynote, once all the new products got posted, www.apple.com slowed down, but was always consistently reachable (I had to collect product information, specs, and photography). store.apple.com performed very poorly for about the first 15 minutes, was closed periodically, and then performed well from about a half hour after the keynote on.
So this isn't "dodgy" at all; I know for an absolute fact that www.apple.com was reachable at what I would consider its "normal" performance during the entire keynote. Of course, that doesn't really matter, since it's AFTER the keynote (when information is actually posted) that matters; but then, too, it was reachable (albeit slower).
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.
Um...
http://www.apple.com/quicktime/qtv/mwsf05/
That was posted within the hour after the conclusion of the keynote. Also, several sites had live coverage during the keynote, AND the satellite program was broadcast live, in the clear, on Galaxy 3, Transponder 23, 4160 MHz Vertical, 93 deg west.
Now I know why your initial post was so wrong. You don't have any idea what you're talking about.
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.
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.
I ran around querying on other IRC channels, especially with people who were following up and having lively banter about MacWorld Expo; and asked them about MacWorld Expo. Apparently, I had 25 responses. Half of them were from the United States and they too could not access Macworld Expo AND Apple's US store site. The rest were sparsely placed all over the globe. I believe other Apple's regional sites serving their respective regions were not greatly affected because most people would just key in "apple.com" into their address bar.
Often we do not have time for our friends, yet all the time in the world for our enemies.
Yes, I'm aware this is the first time a Macworld keynote hasn't been broadcast on the web live.
The keynote at MacWorld Expo 1985 was broadcast on the web live?
I missed that... wonder if my C-64 could have handled it.
Just think about it for a minute:
:)
*Apple* MacWorld event almost killed *Microsoft* Windows Server 2003-based site.
Mwa-ha-ha!
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- -
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
The way Akamai works (I think) is that they do distributed DNS with local DNS servers in a particular region of the world. Their DNS servers direct you to regional servers for some portion of the content. The policies on which content gets Akamaized differ from site to site, and I have no idea about Apple's policies, but as an example, the main page text might be served from www.apple.com while the graphics might come from a-9096.akadns.net or whatever. The quicktime stream of the conference appears to be entirely coming from Akamai.
Thus, it's very possible for a local Akamai node to die under the load, which could result in some temporary regional disruption. Of course, this disruption could also be caused by your ISP's connection to their servers being overloaded, by your ISP's connection towards the U.S. being overloaded, or any number of other local phenomena.
At least from where I'm sitting, www.apple.com was working just fine after the show. Not that this is saying much, since I'm only about half a millisecond ping time away from it, but....
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.