h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

1 - why so slow? slow pc's or too many people?
2 - what can I feed wild ducks and geese other than bread?
3 - is anybody else really out there?

1. Tomorrow's world and the Slashdot Effect?
2. Have you tried polyfiller?
3. No it is all an illusion created for your benefit.

DO YOU WANT TO WAIT FOR THE BOOK TO BE PUBLISHED?

Hi - as you may have seen on the front page of the site, we are being inundated with requests on our servers, which is causing the site to slow down.

The main issue is the network bandwidth - we're only(!) on a T1 link at the moment. To a much lesser extent, the servers slow down occasionally - but it's mainly a bandwidth problem at the moment.

We're working on a number of strategies to avoid these problems.

As for the slashdot-effect, we barely noticed it - it got swamped by the announcing-it-live-to-8-million-TV-viewers-effect.

In the meantime, we're sorry for the delays.

Tim

by jove, it's 5:30 and it's speeded up all of a sudden!

Surprising you didn't notice the /. effect. I tried logging on before the announcement on the
tube, but everything was too slow so I decided to wait a couple days. I wonder how much of
it was bandwidth and how much was NT/IIS?

it's still fast today, perhaps they greased the wheels.

P.S. I still need to know what to feed the ducks other than bread?

hello

Well, we had some people at the TV studio, accessing the site from about 2pm onwards, and everything was fine. Then they put up the URL for the Tomorrow's World page at the bottom of the TV screen, which had a link directly to h2g2.com, and the servers got completely swamped about 2 minutes later - seriously. Slashdot announced it at 7pm GMT (half an hour before the TW announcement) - we didn't notice anything at that time, either in-house or at the remote site (TV studio); it was running fine.

At the moment, our stats indicate we're near capacity for our bandwidth, rather than being hamstrung by IIS. If we increase the pipe, it may be that IIS won't cope - but I'd rather measure the process than guess. Our main problems at the moment are image serving and memory leaks caused by some part of the Perl subsystem.

Tim

Well all seems to working fine about now no problems at all from my end.

Hope you didnt feel to leftout by not being able to go to the TV studios

Hey - if no-one wanted to use this site, it would be very fast...

Anorak answer for ducks and geese; bread can contaminate water if not eaten immediately, feed them folks on dry land with a wheat mix. One company I have used is CJ Wildbird foods. You can check them out at www.birdfood.co.uk, but note they do not have a secure online ordering system, so phone them up instead (01743709545)! Ask them about their 'duck and swan' food.

TV studios are over-rated IMHO

Anyway, it was the British Library building, that they'd temporarily annexed as a TV studio.

It was interesting to see that they seemed to have a real live version of Fizz as a presenter on the Tomorrow's World programme

Tim

whats all this (/.)+(NT/IIS) nonsence then ??

I was trawling the logs for Wednesday tonight. Slashdot were not the cause of our problems by any means. Here's how it went:

3:30 am - site goes live.
3:35am our first researcher registers - 15 seconds after fetching the frontpage
about 6-7pm the slashdot announcement is coming, but I don't think it gets posted yet. I saw only three or four hits from slashdot during the hour leading up to TW and they were from admin pages.
7:30 - TW starts
7:31 - Peter Snow says "wwwDOT bbcDOT coDOT uk FORWARD SLASH tw" and our servers' deflectors flare into the ultraviolet.
7:35 - we get the servers back up, but boy are they slow. Something like 10 cgi requests a second coming in heading towards gridlock.
8:04 - slashdot arrives. I guess they don't like to miss Tomorrow's World? By this time the initial TW onslaught has abated somewhat, and the servers are slowly handling the traffic. They needed to be poked once more that evening, before settling down to a steady 100K/s with 800-1000 connections.

So the slashdot effect, though present, was not the cause of the service crawling.

I just thought I'd share that with you all.

Translation:

"/." refers to a website (slashdot.org), which is alleged to be run for 'Nerds' - the tag line is "News for Nerds. Stuff that matters." It's basically a news service and "here's an interesting web site / event" service, which then allows people to comment on the highlighted news item, web site etc. Comments range from intelligent to banal to flames to outright stupidity. Some days are better than others. Most arguments degenerate into a "Linux is better than NT", "Is not - Linux sucks", "No - NT sucks", no matter what the subject matter. This can limit it as a useful information source, but it's still worth a look because occasionally the intelligent and level-headed readers come out of the woodwork and post some useful information or carefully thought-out opinion.

"NT/IIS" refers to the fact that our servers run Microsoft Windows NT (the "NT" bit) and Microsoft Internet Information Server (the "IIS" bit), which is a web server. For many people reading slashdot, this alone would be enough to send them into a seizure, such is their hatred of Microsoft. If you look at the entry on slashdot for h2g2, you'll see the comments are almost exclusively concerned about what web server/OS we're running, and virtually none are related to the content/functionality of the site. That happens sometimes with slashdot - usually too often.

My own view is that the more vociferous people on slashdot often can't see the woods for the trees, and lose sight of what people are trying to do. But there are some very intelligent and competent people reading it - they're just in the minority, and they're hard to find

Maybe I should turn this into a Guide entry defining what "slashdot" is...or maybe someone else can do a better job.

HTH

Tim

I tried to connect at lunchtime today (1st of May) only to be told that the server didn't exist, or was down - but it seems to be okay now (2:00 onwards)

A friend of mine said he used to feed bread covered in baking soda to birds, but I feel this is just a bit too cruel.

My brother in law tells me that 'space dust' causes the best exhibition, similar to a Chinese New Year celebration in a duck pond!

What you should do is throw bread and then start throwing stones.They r so dumb that they dive under for the stones cause they thing it's bread

I am very intrigued about the NT/IIS platform. I am fervently hoping you prove that with proper tuning and appropriate resources for the load, you can get reliable and swift performance. Good luck!

You can feed ducks on a wheat mixture which can be served al fresco on banks and shallows. Try birdfood.co.uk - I have bought other garden bird food from them, not the "duck and swan mix", their service has been great. They don't have a secure online ordering system, but you can at least check out the products or call them on 01743 709545.