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bostonherald.com down again
By adamg on Sun, 07/26/2009 - 11:01am
"High traffic volumes" again. Who knew Joe Fitzgerald was so popular these days?
Free tagging:
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Comments
Likely story
Loading that "high traffic volumes" page resulted in 28 HTTP requests to Herald servers alone.
(47 HTTP requests altogether, counting third-party.)
You can serve actual newspaper articles with a lot less traffic than that.
There are ways to gracefully degrade, dramatically reducing resource usage and still serving content (static, if necessary) and ads.
Disclosure: I do Internet consulting.
I think it's a lie
The server was showing an SQL error the last time this appeared... but only briefly, before they put up the "ohhh we're so busy - please take a number" message.
Can't keep it up because so many people are trying to use it
There's a Viagra commercial in there, somewhere.
The "No Excuses(tm)" campaign.
Excuses don't go over very well with one's regular users.
Thanks for the reminder
The latest version of Drupal, the one I'm getting ready to move UH over to, has tons of caching options for all sorts of things. Once I'm about to go live, I need to go through the system and turn them all on (they're great on a production site; but a pain when you're futzing around building the site).
reminds me of a conversation I had yesterday with a Comcast rep
Me: yes, I agree, the "Triple Play" is a better deal than keeping Verizon for my landline, since I have Comcast TV and internet.
Rep: so can I sign you up for phone service?
Me: on one condition
Rep: what's that?
Me: Can you promise me that I can get a time to call 1-800-COMCAST without getting a recording of "due to unusually high call volume..." Since I have NEVER, in 7 years of calling NOT gotten that recording, how is the volume "unusual"?
Rep: gee, I never thought of it that way
Me: that's kinda the problem. No one else there is doing any thinking either....
because comcast technical
because comcast technical support representatives really have a lot of control over staffing levels and the messages used in their automated systems.
-- ex-call center employee