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BBC News Under The Bonnet

Posted by Zonk on from the that'd-be-hood-in-the-us dept.

diodesign writes "BBC News has revealed that Linux and Apache power its popular news website, along with a modified DNS server and machine farms in New York and London. At peak times, the site serves over 4 million users and 50 million page impressions a day. It's a pretty well explained guide to producing a regularly updated content based website that scales well." From the article: "The technology which serves the site is designed to be as simple as possible. The simpler the site, the cheaper it is to run. There are fewer elements which can malfunction on big days; and there are fewer parts which can be compromised by someone trying to gain unauthorised access."

8 of 284 comments (clear)

  1. 9th most popular web site by Malc · · Score: 3, Informative

    According to Netcraft, they're the 9th most popular site on the web. That's after several variations of Google, and toolbar.netcraft.com... so take with heaps of NaCl.

    1. Re:9th most popular web site by zootm · · Score: 2, Informative

      Interesting stats. I wonder how microsoft.com is ahead of msn.com? Or for that matter, how is microsoft.com in 3rd place?

      Try typing a URL without the : on a windows box, for example http//google.com (you'll need to paste that into a new window).

  2. Re:A good reason to leave pop-ups on by PaxTech · · Score: 1, Informative

    Yeah, you know, I really wish the US government would take our money ($10 BILLION per year) against our will to fund an organization to tell us what to think. That would totally rock.

    --
    All movements for social change begin as missions, evolve into businesses, and end up as rackets.
  3. Re:whoops by evilmonkey_666 · · Score: 3, Informative

    Bonnet means hood for all you Americans.

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    - PS. This is what part of the alphabet would look like if Q and R where eliminated.
  4. Re:but how does it compare by Daniel_Staal · · Score: 4, Informative

    See the comment directly above you: BBC is the world's 9th busiest site, /. is the 32nd.

    --
    'Sensible' is a curse word.
  5. LAMP Scales, but does your .NET application? by v3xt0r · · Score: 1, Informative

    most people who critisize this article are spoonfed MCSE's who really 'tinker' with the idea of a non-microsoft OS, rather than take the time to actually learn to use it (properly), or reap the rewards it can offer (when properly used).

    But that's a good thing too me, I can just laugh at them when their customers come to me instead. =)

    --
    the only permanence in existence, is the impermanence of existence.
  6. Performance gets way trickier than that by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    The BBC seems like a relatively simple site to optimize for heavy loads -- mostly static pages, and probably 99% of the load comes from hits to the top 20 stories.

    LiveJournal has to deal with millions of user accounts and jillions of posts, plus photos and audio files. Their database, application-level caching, image/audio storage, and Web serving *all* scale horizontally -- little or no "big iron", just lots of commodity boxen. The result: lots of college kids can post "OMG LOL!1!". *That's* democratizing the Internet.

    Anyway, they're a Perl/MySQL shop, and Brad Fitzpatrick gave details on their setup (more recent than his OSCON slides once posted on Slashdot): http://www.mysqluc.com/cs/mysqluc2005/view/e_sess/ 6257

    I'd like to hear information about Amazon, too -- they use Perl and HTML::Mason.

  7. Re:A good reason to leave pop-ups on by Insipid+Trunculance · · Score: 2, Informative

    I wish i wouldnt rise to obvious trolls.But i cant resist and yet i havent anything better to say than this Guy

    Now you know why we love the Aunty.

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    Wanted : A Signature.