Initial reports suggest that, except for a
few regional hot spots, the Internet is
standing up to an onslaught of traffic on
what may turn out to be the biggest day
in the medium's history. All because it is
working exactly the way it was designed
to do.
"It's absolutely crazy at the moment,"
said Andy Gibbs, executive editor of
StarrReport.Com, a site set up to publish
special prosecutor Kenneth Starr's
sex-and-perjury report to Congress. "All
our servers are timed out, and our email
boxes are full with requests."
It's a watershed moment for the Net,
because this marks the first time that
people are relying on it -- rather than
television or the radio -- to receive the
details of a major news event.
Not that things came off without a hitch.
"There's certainly a meltdown on certain
parts of the Internet," observed
Abdelsalam "Solom" Heddaya, vice
president of research for InfoLibria, a
software company dedicated to
developing caching tools to alleviate Web
congestion. "Right now, there's no way to
access government Web sites, which
means certain people who depend on
those sites to do their work simply are
unable to get any work done."
Additionally, Heddaya said businesses in
the Washington, DC, area are likely to be
experiencing related problems. "There are
serious economic implications [to the
slowdown].... Businesses in the
Washington area may be experiencing
disruptions themselves because of the
overload to the Internet infrastructure in
that area."
Network traffic around the capital
increased dramatically. Normal peak
Internet traffic for the metropolitan area
is around 1,680 Mbits per second. Today,
traffic increased to unprecedented levels,
peaking at 1,795 Mbits per second,
according to WorldCom in Jackson,
Mississippi.
WorldCom runs the MAE EAST peering
facility, one of the biggest Internet
interchanges in the country. A graph
supplied to Wired News by WorldCom
depicts the traffic peaking at 4 pm EDT.
"This is very unusual activity," said Kevin
Crothers, WorldCom Internet systems
manager. He added that the MCI
Interconnect Gateway, which links the
White House to the Internet, saw the
most traffic, with evidence of between 20
and 30 million hits and some site failures.
A train derailment early Friday morning
near Atlanta made matters worse by
severing multiple fiber-optic Internet
cables and disrupting service in the
Southeast. The incident led one ISP to
report blackouts from parts of Virginia to
Florida.
The size of the Starr document creates
another problem, Heddaya said. The
Boston Globe, for example, had to break
up the document on its Web site to
minimize timed-out connections due to
dropped packets.
As the document spread across the
Internet, so did the traffic. As expected,
many of the bottlenecks were not in the
links, or physical connections between
machines, but rather at the Web servers
themselves.
Sean Donelan of Data Research
Associates said that the actual Web
servers at the three government sites
hosting the report were overwhelmed, but
that the network delivering traffic to
them is "working just fine."
"Our system is supposed to be able to
handle 1,500 simultaneous log-ins, so it's
a pretty powerful server," said Guy
Lamolinara, a Library of Congress
spokesman.
The load on Web servers lightened as
more and more news organizations copied
and republished Starr's report, diffusing
the congestion. Still, servers at several
popular news organizations were buckling
under the weight of Net surfers eager to
read what turned out to be the clinical,
but titillating, details of President
Clinton's disastrous fling with Monica
Lewinsky.
By midday Friday, sites for CNN, The New
York Times, MSNBC, and Wired News
were overloaded and turning away
visitors. All major news sites worked
feverishly on "load-balancing," the
process of distributing traffic among
numerous servers to avoid the dreaded
"HTTP/1.1 Server Too Busy" error.
CNN Interactive, which posted the
document earlier Friday, confirmed that
the site is experiencing its busiest day
ever. "We're getting 300,000 hits per
minute," said Scott Woelfel, editor in
chief of CNN Interactive in Atlanta.
"That's considerably higher than the
traffic levels generated by our stock
market coverage [on August 31]."
CNN's techies worked late into Thursday
night, adding five new servers to handle
the anticipated deluge. However, even
with the new servers, Woelfel confirmed
that some Web surfers have had trouble
accessing the site, failing to get in even
after repeated attempts.
"We don't anticipate traffic slowing over
the weekend," Woelfel said. "It's going to
take a while for people to really get their
arms around this thing."
MSNBC officials said their site was on
pace to double its previous record of 1.1
million visitors, set on 17 August when
Clinton admitted his "inappropriate
relationship" with Lewinsky.
However, many experts believe the
Internet has not experienced the full
weight of the surfing public yet. "It won't
really start until people get home from
work," said Jon McDougal, a network
engineer for MindSpring Internet services
in Atlanta.
"As of about 4:30 [pm EDT], the LC
circuit was only about 25 percent
utilized," said Bonwich. "About 15 minutes
ago, that had jumped to 36 percent. It
appeared that the report actually made it
to the server sometime about half an
hour ago, although I haven't yet been
able to connect all the way through to
the new URL, icreport.loc.gov.
"So it appears thus far that the predicted
Net meltdown was simply the 'crisis of the
year of the week,' and has most likely
passed, since someone had the good
sense to distribute the document among
the major old-media, new-media, and
portal sites."
James Glave, Claudia Graziano, and Craig
Bicknell contributed to this report.
Related Wired Links:
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