"Amos Shapira" wrote Thu, 19 Jul 2007 09:29:10 +1000:
"Aussie film archives launch
and then crash" -
ZDnet mentions how a 2.5years project ... melted
on the first morning it went public. ...
This has happened before with new instantly
popular sites. It can happen with Linux based
systems as well as others and adding more
hardware does not necessarily help if a million
people suddenly want to look at your site.
It happens that I was talking with staff at the
National Film and Sound archive on Monday and
warned them there was likely to be a problem with
the new web site. A similar problem occurred
with the UK based "Aerial Reconnaissance
Archives" in 2004. There is a discussion of the
issues archived in the ANU's Link mailing list at
<http://mailman.anu.edu.au/pipermail/link/2004-January/054679.html>.
The UK designers had made the job for their
server particularly difficult by giving every
image on the site a different URL for each person
who looked at it. This made sense for tracking
use of the valuable historical photos, but not
when applied to to the logos on the home page. It
made it impossible to cache the images. When the
BBC ran a news item about the site the server was
overloaded. Fixing the URLs for the images on the main pages seemed to help.
A similar problem occurred with the Sentinel fire
tracking system which the Australian Government
launched a few days before bushfires in Canberra
in 2003 <http://www.tomw.net.au/2003/enet.html>.
When the fires broke out the system became
overloaded. A separate server with userids and
passwords for firefighters was installed, but I
also suggested putting some canned output from
the system for the general public to look at. The
canned output could be cached and did not tie up
the database server generating a new map for each user.
Tom Worthington FACS HLM [EMAIL PROTECTED] Ph: 0419 496150
Director, Tomw Communications Pty Ltd ABN: 17 088 714 309
PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617 http://www.tomw.net.au/
Visiting Fellow, ANU Blog: http://www.tomw.net.au/blog/atom.xml
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