BBC on Website Slow Downs 207
HiveMaster writes "The BBC is carrying a report about the impact on websites as people try to get news regarding the war in Iraq. It talks of a report from Keynote Systems, which tests the reponsiveness of websites, which shows that the BBC news site has shown a fourfold increase in response times. However, Government sites in both the US and the UK are being hit, with the US Army site taking over 80 seconds to load at peak times." Also, here is a press release this. You can also read My journal where I've talked quite a bit about what Slashdot has done in preperation for traffic bursts.
Hmmm... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Hmmm... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Hmmm... (Score:4, Informative)
Here's a link [slashdot.org] to the "Tech" section of the FAQ [slashdot.org], which is probably a good place to start.
Re:Hmmm... (Score:2)
Re:Hmmm... (Score:5, Informative)
OK, why did this get modded up?
Slashdot is a high traffic website, and as such, it has to be designed to handle the load that it gets. Sites that get /.ed are usually low traffic sites that aren't set up to the sort of page views that Slashdot.
OTOH, Slashdot generally doesn't have any effect on other high traffic sites. You don't see the /. effect on sites like CNN, Microsoft, Apple, Cisco, or the NY Times. It is when Slashdot links to someone who put up a picture of their case mod, they likely aren't set up to handle the same sort of traffic that /. does and they become inaccessable.
Re:Hmmm... (Score:2)
If it had been modded up as "funny", I would agree with you. However, the post was getting "insightful" mods. There was nothing insightful about it. I try not to get too up in arms about moderation, but that was just dumb. I seem to have had the desired effect, as the post was modded back down. I don't care if it gets modded back up as "funny", but to allow that post to get (Score:5, Insightful) is insulting
Re:Hmmm... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Hmmm... (Score:2)
Kallahar
Re:Hmmm... (Score:3, Interesting)
Then the next day it all works again (I only check a couple of times a day, so to be fair, it could have been fixed the same day)
Re:Hmmm... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Hmmm... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Hmmm... (Score:3, Informative)
Ad impressions for stories on a non-Slashdot site "belong" to the operators of that site, not to Slashdot. Mirroring a webpage would "steal" those ad impressions.
Re:Hmmm... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Hmmm... (Score:3, Insightful)
Your Journal? (Score:3, Funny)
SuDZ
Re:Your Journal? (Score:2)
Did you see the part where he said "We're also going to move the AC default threshold to 2."? For a moment I though he meant that AC comments would start out scored at 2. Now that's a scary thought. Of course it's fun to think about
ACs reloading the page and wondering why they can't see their own post.
and it won't get any better... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:and it won't get any better... (Score:3, Funny)
Satellite availability? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Satellite availability? (Score:5, Informative)
Another factor: more streaming (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Another factor: more streaming-Realvideo. (Score:2)
For better or for worse?
Put a proxy-cache in front of it. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Put a proxy-cache in front of it. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Put a proxy-cache in front of it. (Score:4, Informative)
Page load times can be vastly improved by hiring someone with a bunch of capacity spread around the country/world, and having the content served from the closest server to the user. Akamai is one provider, there are probably others. Effectively, it gives you thousands of webservers to handle your load. Beats trying to predict when and how much the load is going to spike. (I wonder if any akamaized sites have been slashdotted, and how the usage graphs for that look?)
Re:Put a proxy-cache in front of it. (Score:4, Interesting)
We use cheap netra t1's in a cluster behind load balancers, but our bandwidth usage per user is very small (1-5K) compared to Slashdot 50-100K page pulls.
Strange how people design networks and server configurations without knowing the purpose. This is why when a product is handed off to the customer, they customers end up redesignning the architecture. Its not a cookie cutter world people...
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You know the world's gone mad when the best rapper is a white guy, the best golfer is a black guy, the Swiss hold the America's Cup, France is accusing the USA of arrogance and the Germans don't want to go to war.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Internet hacks? (Score:1)
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:The bias........ (Score:2)
Along with Saddam's countdown to death and the alert-o-meter, I think everyone knows by now that Fox News is a piece of crap. Fox News is more like Hard Copy than CNN, and even CNN is pushing the limits of good taste.
Re:The bias........ (Score:2)
But only for our Christian soldiers, right? The rest are on their own?
Speaking of prayer, they just had the guy in the mosque tower giving the call to prayer in Baghdad. I would have thought that the sound of U.S. ordinance would have had that covered already.
Hope we missed as many civilian targets as possible.
Re:The bias........ (Score:2)
C'mon, you know that's not true. We pray for ALL the coalition troops. That includes the thousands of Muslims in the U.S. military. I pray also for Iraq's downtrodden, ragtag troops, who are forced to fight for Saddam.
Hope we missed as many civilian targets as possible.
I hope we didn't miss any! We drop bombs on military targets, but food and supplies on civilian targets.
Re:The bias........ (Score:2)
If they ran that same spot with a Star of David or the Islamic Crescent symbol instead of a cross, imagine all the flack they'd catch.
Let me amend my previous statement. I hope our bombs don't hurt any people ('cept maybe that little Stalin wannabe and those who share in his guilt), but that they do such a scary job on a bunch of replaceable buildings (as opposed to ancient s
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:worste post ever. (Score:2)
Ace's Hardware does it best. (Score:5, Interesting)
Pretty cool actually.
Re:Ace's Hardware does it best. (Score:2)
And, according to the FAQ, Slashdot is run off 600MHz CPUs in a modestly-sized cluster. Stuff like this makes me look at the crap-apps running on our SMP "enterprise" servers and shake my head.
I think I've been hearing "we can just throw more hardware at it later" ever since my first 386...
Re:Ace's Hardware does it best. (Score:3, Interesting)
oi (Score:5, Funny)
There's a joke in there somewhere, for sure.
DejaVu (Score:1)
Girls don't like me because I'm too smart. I'm not gay, damnit!
BBC Webmaster 2003:
You can't get to the site because of the war. I'm not gay, damnit!
Good idea... (Score:4, Funny)
More and more of my fellow Americans (Score:2)
are watching the BBC video stream. It's much more clear and less "ooooh, shiny tanks!" than the major American newsfeeds. Pulling that stream over the transatlantic channels is always going to be slow.
A friend of mine told me he's only been watching the Naked News since the war started. Apparently reports of massive explosions, hundreds of tanks, and Iraqi citizens partying in the streets just seems to sound so much clearer when reported by nude people. I'll have to try it.
slashdot (Score:4, Funny)
Give credit where credit is due (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Give credit where credit is due (Score:2)
Sure, the site is heavily loaded, but I doubt Slashdot had much to do with that.
Oh great... (Score:2)
Looks good for small sites! (Score:3, Insightful)
Fourfold!?? (Score:5, Interesting)
10 seconds to render the whole page. OK, that's been significantly faster than I've been experiencing the last few days, It's been about 30-40 seconds in some instances in the past several days.
Do try the low graphics version of the BBC, it loads almost instantly, and you can click on "Low Graphics" version while the rest of the page is trying to load.
CNN does seem significantly better than years ago during major events. They must have tackling the planetary event slashdot effect thing down. But then again, I voted "Any non-us venue" on the poll..
Re:Fourfold!?? (Score:5, Funny)
A more North American slant would have been something pithier like "lots mucher."
BBC Website Slows Down (Score:4, Funny)
Let the government provide adequate resources (Score:1)
If the US government were to provide resources and capacity for crucial websites at times of need, it could also indirectly influence what they say. A win/win situation.
Yeah, right... (Score:2, Funny)
How ironic... (Score:5, Interesting)
ISTR that the NYT websute switched to a very graphics-light format in 11 September 2001, in order to cope with the mass traffic. Slashdot is already mostly text, but if necessary it could be lightened a bit. But I imagine the main load is CPU and memory, handling all those database queries and updates, rather than bandwidth; I don't see an easy way of dealing with that short of adding a few more machines. Imagine a... No, I won't :-)
By "US and UK Government Sites Being Hit" (Score:2)
My site is ok (Score:2, Funny)
Re:My site is ok (Score:2)
Some navy guy in a submarine is bored out of his mind. :)
Light pages (Score:5, Interesting)
According this [allaboutyo...ebsite.com], the average web page is around 90 Kb. Google is a little over 10 Kb.
Re:Light pages (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, the pages probably don't have a whole lot to do with it. Transmition is light. You can saturate a 100 mbit link without much hardware at all.
The real expense is in the database processing. The cost of performing even a relatively simple SQL query is generally a lot higher than the cost of serving out several large images.
steve
unbelivable.. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:unbelivable.. (Score:2)
Re:unbelivable.. (Score:2)
It's not about who went in first. The objective of the war is to liberate Iraq, not conquer it, and therefore NO member of the military of ANY country should be raising their country's flag.
Re:unbelivable.. (Score:2)
Iraq too (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Iraq too (Score:2)
BTW, Was funny to read Sadam's speechs on that site. The other interesting part was the names of the hospitals and schools, Sadam this, hussein that....
Also, I should really be using an anon-proxy, all I need is my IP's showing up on their webservers logs.
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you know the world's gone mad when the best rapper is a white guy, the best golfer is a black guy, the Swiss hold the Americ
Re:Iraq too (Score:2)
I bet it's because of that last Microsoft patch. (Score:2)
The BBC is great for other things besides news. (Score:2, Interesting)
Such are the side effects of outrageously high demand for their news content, I guess.
We all slow down, (Score:3, Insightful)
Many sites have prepared for this pressure in the days before, specially when the 48 hour deadline came, another server or two got into the pool in the loadbalancers.
They call the load a problem? (Score:2, Insightful)
I had their live video feed going for an hour or so this afternoon. It lost about 12% of the packets. Not bad considering the same thing on CNN wouldn't load. I tried to check out the BBC World broadband live feed, but that requires registering for some sort of free (Real??)
Also a problem for places outbound connections (Score:4, Interesting)
Luckily Shock and Awe started after most of our classes were done for the week and Thurs wasn't that bad. I guess with all the Kazaa traffic, streaming web didn't stand a chance
Can't wait for that packetshaper to get here.
A new book? (Score:3, Funny)
In smaller print:
Business guide to avoding web slow downs.
Thought I'd keep my typo/spelling mistake for real effect...
StarTux
"can of worms" (Score:1)
If you're a sysadmin... (Score:5, Informative)
Make it transparent most of the time, but on days like today, cache CNN.com, MSNBC.com, Foxnews.com, whatever. Cuts down on bandwidth utilization both for your company and for the target site.
emergency web pages? (Score:4, Insightful)
I would reference Home Page Usability [useit.com] in which rule #94 is to have an alternate home page for times of emergency. The New York Times had a successful deployment of such a page on 9/11, and seems to be meeting demand now. I wonder how many others agencies have emergency web pages set up that can better meet demand.
What's the point... (Score:2, Interesting)
a force stronger than the slashdot effect (Score:4, Funny)
Finally a force stronger than the slashdot effect.
Next/Prev Links - possible high-traffic workaround (Score:4, Insightful)
<- prev | next ->
Which points to something like "current_article_url&goto=prev" and "current_article_url&goto=next". That would avoid a database call until you actually click the link (it would translate that into the actual previous and next articles and then show the correct one).
Of course, you lose a little bit of the dynamic site aspect but if you *really* can't remember what the next article was you can always keep the main page open in a new browser window/tab and refer back to it.
thanks (Score:5, Insightful)
I know I'll be unpopular by saying this, but thanks for all the hard work. You guys have a lot of experience handling rediculous loads, so when stuff like this comes around,
No Livestream (Score:2, Informative)
It slows down? Big woop! (Score:2)
More to the point, both NY Times [nyt.com] and WashingtonPost.com [washingtonpost.com] are serving huge images on their home page. MSNBC, FOXNEWS and CNN also seem to have no problem keeping up with my broadband connection.
And they have been quite responsive.
They are even serving up video and audio.
Seem prepared to me.
see bbc's own website stats (Score:4, Interesting)
Lots of mrtg graphs, response times, uptimes etc. Even a webcam of the support team
DOS attacks on financial sites (Score:5, Interesting)
We have an 8-way cluster of machines to support this (way-overkill for the most part) but recently, we've been (almost) hitting limits... The apache service has logged peaks of 1000 connections/second, with the DB query-level going as high as 70,000/second....
I'm actually fairly happy that the system can more-or-less cope with the load, but nonetheless, I want to make sure (or at least as-sure-as-possible) that we can't be easily DOS'd, so this weekend I'll be writing an Apache module to monitor the number-of-connections-per-second on an IP-by-IP basis, and take a decision to run a script depending on thresholds....
I think stateful firewalls could probably manage it but for historical reasons we're stuck with what we have, and having apache call a bandwidth-limiting script on an IP address that's registered 5000 hits in the last minute (for example) seems reasonable
If there's something that can do this already, I'd like to know - I've found (ntal [sf.net]), but running a script per packet doesn't appeal
Ideas gratefully received
Simon
Missing The Winter Music Conference (Score:3, Funny)
Dammit some of us are interested in *real* news.
All I care about is the weapons of mass dancing that the DJ's are going to be showing off.
Re:God bless the Internet! (Score:4, Interesting)
Oh my God! They've slashdotted Bagdhad! (Score:3, Funny)
Re:God bless Pravda (Score:1)
Now that's the kind of quality writing I turn to Pravda for. Rock on, you incoherent alarmist bastards!
BBC is not FoxNews (Score:1, Offtopic)
Re:BBC is not FoxNews (Score:2)
Re:BBC is not FoxNews (Score:2)
Re:BBC is not FoxNews (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:BBC is not FoxNews (Score:2)
Re:BBC is not FoxNews (Score:2)
Re:BBC is not FoxNews (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:BBC is not FoxNews (Score:2)
Re:From Arab News, Saudi Arabia (Score:2)
Re:From Arab News, Saudi Arabia (Score:2)
Re:From Arab News, Saudi Arabia (Score:2)
FWIW, I really like Drudge Report [drudgereport.com]. He tends to sensationalize his headlines, but he gets stories quickly, and he uses a good share of international, non-US news links.
Re:From Arab News, Saudi Arabia (Score:2)
Re:PENTAGON THREATENSTO KILL INDEPENDENTREPORTERS (Score:2)