News Sites Slammed By Michael Jackson Traffic

miller60 writes "Major news sites struggled to remain online yesterday evening as news of Michael Jackson's death triggered huge waves of Internet traffic. TMZ.com broke the news and was quickly overwhelmed, while Twitter turned off features to handle its load. They weren't alone. Keynote Systems reports that ABC, AOL, CBS, CNN Money, MSNBC, NBC, and Yahoo! News all experienced performance problems between 6:15 and 9 pm Eastern time, when the average availability of news sites tracked by Keynote dropped from almost 100% to 86%. The cloud computing crowd immediately jumped on the traffic jams to argue their case. 'Not have a cloud bursting strategy in the age of cloud computing isn't just wrong — it's idiotic,' wrote one cloud blogger."

Comments

Poll results

[suso]

Right now the results of the /. poll are showing the majority of votes as him being forgettable. Obviously the current young generation has no idea the impact MJ had on the world. Perhaps in time they will learn.

Re:Poll results

[Rockoon]

How about having the biggest selling album ever? Its been several decades now and nobody else has come close. Thats how big of an impact MJ had.

It was only later that the pedophilia stuff cropped up.. but by then he was already a legend ranking right up there will Elvis, and if it werent for the pedophelia stuff his funeral would be as big as JFK's or John Lennon's (thats assuming it wont be, but it may very well actualy be)

A freakish monster obsessed with surgical modifcations? Yep. Caught in several pedophelia scandals? Yep. One of the biggest musicians ever? Also true.

Re:Poll results

[pbhj]

good grief, by any serious consideration of musical talent he was nothing special, made no new contribution to the arts. Hype and marketing success story, sure. But being almost the same age as MJ I can tell you neither I nor any of my friends growing up cared for his music, especially as he spent half his life being a weirdo.

I don't own any Michael Jackson music, nor have I ever been to any of his concerts, etc..

He may not have had any serious musical talent (which pop stars do?), I suspect he did within his genre, but you can't deny that he was an exceptional performer. Perhaps he was just the canvas on which many people painted a performance, however, he was central to that. Perhaps you don't like that style but you've got to appreciate the fact that he's one of the highest selling artistes ever and entertained on stage over about 40 years. That's an achievement.

I'd also think he made substantial contributions to the arts in his performance of some quite novel choreographic sequences- who'd done a zombie dance before thriller!? Who'd seen moonwalking before MJ popularised it.

Re:Poll results

[Sir_Lewk]

Oh screw off, culture and the arts are an important part of defining "who we are" as a race. Without our movies, music, paintings and books we would completely loose our sense of who we are, and where we've been. (books in particular, do you really think the world would not be negatively effected if all of the classics simply ceased to exist over night?)

Re:Poll results

[Draek]

Its not about liking him, its about recognizing the huge influence he had over contemporary and later musicians. Its much like Nirvana, I may personally hate their music (and that statement alone would've been enough to send my karma into the fiery pits of hell, had Slashdot a younger population), but even to me the influence they've had over pretty much anything that calls itself "rock" these days is undeniable. Michael Jackson represented the same thing for pop, so regardless of whether you liked him or not he most certainly wasn't "forgettable".

Re:Poll results

[baap]

Im sorry but this sort of cynicism deserves to be slammed. You being from the Michael Jackson generation and saying that he was mostly hated is not a worthy thing to say to one of the few American entertainers that constituted the ubiquitous symbol of emancipation your country represented to the rest of the world during some pretty hard times. This is a man whose name and music was recognized and appreciated from the somalian pirates to the pashtuns carting RPGs to the Taliban. No im not saying he was the preferred musician for terrorists, the world over but that he provided common ground for the whole world to sing/dance and express themselves. Your limited perception of his phenomenon is testament to the isolation you are in and a refusal to participate in mourning this musical genius. I equate you to the Paparazzi of the Beethoven generation. thanks /\ \/

Re:Poll results

[Rockoon]

I formally charge you with pedophilia. You have done so with impunity for years on end. You should be thrown to the wolves.

Certainly the accusation is there in the case of Michael Jackson, but he remained unconvicted, just like you.

*sigh*

[vertinox]

I hate to say this, but things like this (and Anna Nichole Smith) make me weep for humanity.

We put too much interest in people whose saving grace is that they can put a song together when there are so many other problems in the world that need resolving.

Do you think world would have paid as much attention to Stephen Hawking if he died?

I'd doubt it but he's probably made a greater contribution to mankind over the long term compared to MJ.

Secondly, MJ kind of screwed the pooch when it came to financial responsibility. The guy was known to publicly throw tantrums at his personal assistants when they told him to stop buying everything in the store and spent millions on stuff like paintings, statues, and luxuries that none of us could ever afford.

Hell... For all the grief we give about Bill Gates, at least he is doing something for humanity that is good other than spend money on luxuries. The guy is not a hero and we should not look to him for inspiration. Plenty of other people in streets of Iran to look for that.

Re:*sigh*

[slyn]

For the a lot of people who grew up during his heyday, Michael Jackson was "The King of Pop". As a singer/performer, he helped define a genre during his time. People remember the emotions of getting pumped up before a game to a song, or losing their virginity to a song, or getting through a rough time with a song. Those emotional attachments create powerful memories and connections.

When my grandfather died my mom listened to the same Yanni CD for like 12 months straight and it never occurred to me why until like 4 years later when I made the connection that that was what we would always listen to on our weekly visits to the nursing home, and that the songs soothed her and helped her cope with the loss. Because of that, Yanni (whose music I'm not even a fan of) evokes a pretty strong emotion to me, and a much stronger emotion from my mom. The completely intangible feelings that music can give you can feel _more_ tangible or be more rememberable than the changes to our lives brought about by the achievements of some guy in a lab, even if those lab achievements mean far more to mankind in the long or short run.

Cloud

[Martz]

What if everyone uses Cloud hosting?

The Cloud works for some customers because they are depending on under-utilization of the available resources. If all the news agenices, Twitter and Facebook all used Amazon then perhaps it would create the same melt down.

Re:Cloud

[SatanicPuppy]

That's exactly what I was thinking. Right now these sites have to spend a certain amount of cash to prepare for these types of events. If they were all "in the cloud" then they wouldn't bother with that extra capacity...The cloud can cover it, right?

As soon as some generalized event comes along that saturates a number of big "cloud" subscribers, then the whole system is going to be heavily taxed, not just a few individual sites, and by the very nature of the "cloud" thing, that will affect a wide number of sites outside the sites that would otherwise be affected.

You're going to have to sell me on redundancy before you can get me to buy into magical cloud land.

Re:Cloud

[ezzzD55J]

from the blogpost:

why elasticity is so important when architecting your web application stack

while probably technically with merit, sentences, verbiage like this make me want to be sick. exorcist sick.

My Pet Project Will Save Everything

[hardburn]

This wouldn't have happened if they had my poorly-defined buzzword idea!

Cloud in Neverland Fantasy

[syousef]

Cloud computing pundits seem to ramble about instant on access and scalability. Nice fantasy. What they actually want to do is make you buy into a single vendor system that's tightly controlled, which may or may not scale as expected when the time comes and that is plagued by the same outages we see from any service vendor.

I can't believe people care about this!

[FatalTourist]

I am going to write a whiny, holier-than-thou post on the Internet to let everyone know that I know there are more important things in the world: starving children, Iran, etc. There you go, my sweet ego...

Well. If it had been posted to a newsgroup

[Colin Smith]

The news would have been everywhere with minimal bandwidth consumed.

Basically, the webserver concept is broken for really big traffic.

Of course, the problem with usenet is it's too efficient. People can post crap too easily and get others to pay for it.
 

He was a childhood idol to many

[phorm]

I remember that when I was young, MJ was very much an idol to many people my age. Who says we're looking to him for inspiration - or even as a role-model - in this day and age? No, it's the passing of something from our youth. We mourn what he was, not what he had become.

And yes, if Stephen Hawking passed I'd imagine it would still be a fairly big event as well.