<quote who="Antony Clarke">
> On that fatefull day in the USA, www.cnn.com and most other news sites
> were unreachable for a few hours even to american users with leased lines.
> Does anyone know if this was due to bandwith availability or load on the
> servers?
Both, undoubtedly.
> Can a connection timeout be caused by more than a bandwith problem?
A connection timeout is what your browser (or client) does when it can't
maintain or establish a connection for specified amount of time. This can
be caused by the server not being able to provide a connection, the client
not being able to contact the server, or (if the client is being nice to
you) the client's inability to make a reasonably successful connection on a
number of attempts.
Slashdot had an article up about what they did to handle the load, one stat
being 40 pageviews per second. CNN's server was undoubtedly getting a
shitload more than that, so you can imagine that before they switched to a
static page, the effort required to create and feed each connection would
have been pretty ginormous, even if most of the processing was done on
backend machines.
- Jeff
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"From my observation, when it comes to porting Linux to a particular
device, a point doesn't appear to be necessary." - mpt
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