Neil Kittipalo wrote:
>BTW If I use Mozilla it reports
>
>"The connection was refused when attempting to contact slasdot.org"
>
>Opera just seems to sit there waiting for something to happen.
>
Dig: When OSDN and Exodus (Our servers are at an Exodus facility) busily
move, reload and reboot our various Webheads, database servers, and
routers, which they've been doing for the last few days, sometimes the
DNS for some parts of the network changes so people using one backbone
provider may get access but people on another may not, and even some
parts of the site may seem to be working while others aren't.
Slashdot readership keeps growing, ditto the number of comments posted
and use of other site facilities (like journals, moderation, and
searches). Once again - more bandwidth and more hardware. The site is
up to nearly 2.5 million pageviews on the average weekday, and must
maintain a database that is continually both accessed and written to,
which makes it more challenging than running Google's, which is larger
but doesn't let readers write to it all the time. Google and other big
providers can shut down write-to access for a minute or an hour and no
one notices. Slashdot can't. Neither can SourceForge.net, which gets as
many users and pageviews as Slashdot and is even more expensive to run.
Wednesday, the day before the moves started, OSDN delivered over 6.5
million pages, all dynamically generated, all tarred before they were
sent (in order to keep our bandwidth bills from getting even higher than
they already are). I remember when we had our first 500,000 pageview
day on Slashdot and thought, "Well, this little niche site has peaked
now," and having similar thoughts on our first 1 million pageview day. I
remember our whole network being happy - -overjoyed -- with 2 million
pageviews.
We are not all going to jump on Yazz and Uriah, the sysadmins
responsible for OSDN's network now.... they held things together with
string and tape and leftover VA Linux servers as long as they could
without any service interruptions... and are now busy busy getting
things squared away with some new hardware in a new, larger Exodus cage.
Now the ad salespeople need to go out and get cracking to bring in money
to PAY for all of this...
I'll tell you: I often think it's a miracle that our sites hold together
as well as they do, especially considering the unique/experimental
nature of so much of our configuration.
Note that this move is being done on a holiday weekend for most of the
world, when traffic is a lot lighter than on normal weekdays.
It would have been nicer to wait until summer, but there was just no way.
- Robin
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