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Mozilla Outage On Firefox 3 Record Launch Day
Kolargol00 writes "An outage affected the Mozilla.com website on the day the organisation launched its Guinness World Record attempt for downloads of the new Firefox 3 browser. The mozilla.com site was unreachable from around the world, occasionally responding with the message, 'Http/1.1 Service Unavailable.'" Since they decided to run their day from 1pm to 1pm Eastern time, the download day is actually still going, so you can still get Firefox and be part of the record.
A large chair-shaped dent was subsequently found in the side of their web server, and a large sweaty man was seen running from the scene of the crime shouting "DEVLOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS!!"
I thought it was my browser ...
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
As unwise as it may be to post a link to the download counter on slashdot, you can find a real time counter here.
By my calculations, they won't be able to hit the 10 million mark in time.
Isn't this one of those "there's no record yet, so anything we do is a record" records? Or is this the record book's attempt to record a genuine record and best the record of a previous record holder?
I'm quite sure Amazon would have been delighted to host mozilla.com temporarily on the EC2 cloud, or Akamai on their service, just for the bragging rights of supporting the most downloads EVAR!
Victoria's Secret learned a LONG time ago when broadcasting their "Fashion show" online for the first time: If you want to deal with massive hordes of salavating geeks, you need to use a CDN.
Test your net with Netalyzr
I understand the promotional impact that the record attempt has, but it still seemed dumb to me to invite the entire world to try to melt your servers by manufacturing a download spike.
It'd be nice if they could use bittorrent to help with the load they're putting on themselves.
During the outage, I was still able to find a mirror ftp site that had the 3.0 install, and download it, but it wasn't as easy as it should have been, and lots of other parts of the mozilla site went down at times, too, making it difficult to find extensions, or just information.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
It seems like they really botched this, from not knowing when the date would be until last week to starting the day at 1 PM without getting the word out and now to their site going down in the middle of it.
Sorry, the font on that page is so small I can barely read it.
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
Only those who download Firefow from the website will be counted? That would be pretty much only the Windows users, I guess.
Lots of people just use Synaptics or whatever package manager their distro provides. In my case it will be typing "emerge -avuDt world". I'm not going to download from the website just to get counted, you know.
I am not really here right now.
Sure, 'cause the guys making the browser are the same guys running the servers.
Makes sense. The IE team at MS loves firefox: http://arstechnica.com/journals/linux.ars/2008/06/17/the-cake-is-a-lie-ie-team-bakes-a-treat-for-mozilla
The Firefox people decided to start counting the 24 hours at 11:16 a.m. Pacific, after they got their servers back up and everything straightened out.
So take heart, frustrated downloaders: you have 76 more minutes than you thought.
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
Why is it that 24 hours after the crash happened, we're now hearing about how the servers were down 24 hours ago?
The REAL news: According to the download counter, Firefox has long surpassed their stated goal of 1.5 million downloads, and is now over 6.5 million. This is cause for frontpage news, not the stupid server crash.
Yes and yes.
Greenland is beating North Korea, Western Sahara, and the Falkland Islands COMBINED!
If they make it, everyone goes to Guinness' book site to see the record.
If they fail, they'll be drowning their sorrows in pints of Guinness...
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Attempted to download Firefox (Safari on Windows XP) and I get this message when the download is complete:
"The fight for freedom has only just begun." - Geert Wilders
I suspect the IE team set their own Guinness World Record for "most human urine ever baked into a cake."
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
just to run up the numbers? it's "inconceivable!" (but the word may not mean what i think it means...... heh
A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort.
His name is also Chad.
Seriously, Don't take anything I say seriously.
Why not just pick the best 24 hour period after the fact ...
Hence if the site was down for an hour, just collect your data from 11am - 11am instead of 10am.
(I think someone already posted to that effect - but still, they don't have to commit to the first 24 hours, just the best 24 hours).
Three cheers for Portable Apps!
I'm happily running Firefox 3 on my locked down corporate laptop.
W00t!
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
whoosh /wu, w, wu, w/
-noun 1. a loud, rushing noise, as of air or water: a great whoosh as the door opened.
-verb (used without object) 2. to move swiftly with a gushing or hissing noise: gusts of wind whooshing through the trees.
-verb (used with object) 3. to move (an object, a person, etc.) with a whooshing motion or sound: The storm whooshed the waves over the road.
"It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him." - Tolkien
That's why you should only eat open-recipe cakes.
Who ordered that?
Who would you expect to be ahead of Germany? There are countries with larger populations, but they're substantially poorer per capita; fewer of their people will be downloading Firefox today. Germany is the most populous country in the EU, it is very rich, and very technologically advanced.
To my mind, the only country that might have a chance of outFirefoxing Germany and taking second place would be Japan. And they're not so far behind (at time of writing, Germany is on 499,014 and Japan is on 369,364).
The big surprise here for me is Iran. 207,816 downloads, comparable to Britain, France or Spain. I suppose their wartime baby boom is now a generation of internet-savvy students. Can't imagine hardline fundamentalism keeping hold on that demographic for too long.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
While the poster you replied too was close to the mark, they missed by a bit.
/. kills sites all the time, without even trying and they could have just been unprepared for the response they got.
However your response fall right in line with what corporate America expects.
Corporate America doesn't fully trust Open Source.
There are many reasons and they ARE slowly coming around.
However, Firefox is a flagship open source project.
Meaning it is high profile, highly visible to EVERYONE (not just the back end staff running things like PostGres or MySQL, or even Apache), and expected to be a "polished finished product".
The fact that Mozilla ADVERTISED their attempt at a download record and then had these types of what appear to most normal people to be comical and poorly planned errors, lends great credence to the average persons suspiciousness of open source programs.
the true fact of the matter is, if Microsoft had done something like this, or Apple, or god forbid somebody like Red Hat or Sun or Debian, the likelyhood is the errors would not have happened, and if they had for the first two, there would be much crowing and jeering from the FOSS idiots who think anytime something like this happens to the "Big bad corporate entities" it's a good thing.
Your response falls right in line with what the average PHB or average MM would expect from a zealot.
[whine]It's not Mozilla's fault, they are giving this away....
Let's see you do better.....
They don't have the resources.....
etc.
[/whine]
here's an idea.....
SHUT THE FUCK UP WITH THE WHINING!!!!!
it just plain reeks of zealotism and makes the projects look bad.
Mozilla fucked up, plain and simple.
They might have done something stupid like intentionally disallow the upgrading from within a current version of FF (I personally tried all day and all i got was the "Sorry, but here's a helpful link to direct download it" message on several computers.) just so they could better track the direct downloads to give a true figure for their record. They might have also just simply not expected as many as they got.
It happens.
However, going around and whining and bitching and being an ass while trying to defend something that does not need your defense merely plays right into the preconceived notions of many people, and actually does a great disservice to the project.
so please, support the project but don't be the expected "religious zealot" type and further push the corporate types away from this and other very good and very useful open source projects.
mmm, yellowcake.
A torrent redirect would have served just as well,
and I think total downloads could still be tracked.
With it being a torrent all the ppl downloading would
have taken a LOT of load off the servers.
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
Open Recipe cake only benefits you if you compile it yourself. Otherwise, you don't know what may have been slipped in at compile time.
I like my beverages with warning labels!
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
The reason that Microsoft pushed XAML as hard as they do is because they wanted to once again control the web. Some moron in Microsoft's marketing department must have thought that with XAML being easy to use and implement would stop supporting html/xhtml and slowly move over to XAMl based applications.
This, of course, didn't happen for the same reason activex didn't become hugely popular: it's not compatible with other browsers.
The web has come far enough now, that microsoft cannot really control it realistically.
But then, another goon in marketing thought that Silverlight would be the answer...