On Sun, Sep 16, 2001 at 12:08:42AM +1000, Jeff Waugh wrote:
> 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.
I read in a Sydney Morning Herald article that in the 24 hours after it
happened, cnn.com served something like 14 million pages per hour,
instead of 9 million per day. I don't have the article handy, and I
can't find a link on the web, so I could be confusing those stats with
those for smh.com.au (which were in the same article).
Regardless of the numbers, I'm certain that they were serving more pages
per hour than they usually serve per day.
It was interesting to note the page they reverted to using -- it was
simple HTML, with only two graphics (a CNN logo and a photo of the
burning WTC). This suggests that bandwidth and/or the number of
connections made to their servers to serve images was part of the
problem. I didn't check at the time if they disabled their
session-tracking cookies, though I suspect they did.
As time went by their pages grew progressively more like their normal
front page -- one or two more graphics, change of layout, etc. I don't
know if that is because the initial demand for information slowed down
or if they were just slowly adding stuff to the page to see how far they
could push it.
It would be interesting to know for certain. Especially seeing as I
observed pretty much the same thing for abcnews.com, abc.net.au and
smh.com.au.
And finally, here's what Netcraft have to say about cnn.com:
"The site cnn.com is running Netscape-Enterprise/4.1 on Solaris", and
also that of their 10 IPs, all but one in the netblock owned by Turner
Broadcasting. The other one is owned by America Online, Inc -- and that
is the only server that seems to have been rebooted this month (Sept
13th).
-Andrew.
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