US Amazon.com Website Down For Over 1 Hour 228
CorporalKlinger writes "CNET News is reporting that Amazon's US website, Amazon.com, has been unreachable since 10:30 AM PDT today. As of posting, visiting www.amazon.com produces an 'Http/1.1 Service Unavailable' message. According to CNET, "Based on last quarter's revenue of $4.13 billion, a full-scale global outage would cost Amazon more than $31,000 per minute on average." Some of Amazon's international websites still appear to be working, and some pages on the US Amazon.com site load if accessed using HTTPS instead of HTTP."
So, it finally happened... (Score:5, Interesting)
Believe me, if you've seen the code that runs that site, it's impressive it runs as well as it does. Try to imagine 900M static binaries that take almost an hour to link because of some tiny little code change, because they can't be fucked to make their deployment system deal with dynamic libraries reasonably.
Re:So, it finally happened... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:This will surely help (Score:5, Interesting)
thinks I am a robot (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:So, it finally happened... (Score:5, Interesting)
Believe me, if you've seen the code that runs that site, it's impressive it runs as well as it does. Try to imagine 900M static binaries that take almost an hour to link because of some tiny little code change, because they can't be fucked to make their deployment system deal with dynamic libraries reasonably.
Fuck up a dynamic library and you fuck everything. Fuck up one of those 900M programs and you've fucked 1/900M'th of everything.
What does Amazon's back end compile for? If it's Linux, that's an issue right there. The GNU linker has pathological behavior when linking large numbers of static libraries. I work on a relatively small (~1 million line) codebase and it takes about ten minutes to link. Link it on another platform (e.g. Solaris) and it links in about five seconds.
The problem isn't the huge number of libraries. The problem is that the linker blows.
AWS and EC2 (Score:3, Interesting)
A bit strange, the people wondering why this is news. Amazon provides the backend for a number of web services with their EC2 and AWS platforms. This is going to make third parties seriously consider whether or not they want to trust Amazon with their business.
That is yet another reason why this is Real News(tm).
Get better Amazon, we love you! (T_T) (Score:3, Interesting)
Amazon is as good as eBay-Paypal is evil. Both are outstanding products but one is loved and one is hated.
Sooo...in the time that I wrote this post, Amazon lost enough money to sustain me my entire life. That's sad.
Cost of outage (Score:4, Interesting)
Stephan
Re:So, it finally happened... (Score:3, Interesting)
Ian Lance Taylor said...
ralph: The main difference in gold is that it was designed from the ground up to work for ELF. The GNU linker was designed to work for a.out and COFF.
ELF conceptually requires three passes over the object files, a.out and COFF require two. A version of the third pass was hacked into the GNU linker by using a backpatch system on the symbol table, in which the GNU linker makes some decisions when it first reads the object file, and then undoes those decisions when appropriate after seeing all the objects. The backpatching causes the GNU linker to traverse the symbol table multiple times; this is very expensive in a large link. Reducing the number of symbol table traversals is probably the most significant change.
A couple of smaller but significant changes can be found on my blog:
Multi-threading.
C++ templates avoid byte swapping.
April 7, 2008 9:03 AM
Re:This will surely help (Score:1, Interesting)