Farked/Boing Boing'd tonight
 

The Pakistan garbage area/ferris wheel is proving to be the most popular IotD ever. It was Boing Boing'd today and then linked directly on the Fark homepage at about 10:30 pm, which is why we died about an hour and a half ago. We would have easily set a new high number of users but the system was so busy it wound up just blinking for a while.

No shit !!!
Coool !!!

Ah so, no wonder I couldn't hook up earlier. I saw 754 (9 members, 745 guests) about 1:30am. I thought they all came to see me. :(

Good God! Fark has over 10k hits on the link at the top of the page.

How much more do they spend on bandwidth than you do, UT? Not that I'm callilng you cheap, on the contrary...I have a whole new respect for the scale of things online.

Fark is an interesting case because almost everything they serve is text, not images. So it doesn't take much bandwidth at all. Their real secret is writing everything in Perl and optimizing the crap out of it, I think.

I'm a little disappointed in how quickly this place choked. Just last week I was looking into performance on the system. I spent some time reducing the memory footprint of Apache by removing pieces we don't use. Didn't help... and I'm not sure why! With a Pentium 2500 and not running anything graphical, this place should fly a little faster than it does now. It may be that vBulletin's new features are really demanding on the server for some reason.

Holy shit! The albino peacock (3/31) IotD just hit the FARK main page at 2:56 EDT this morning (with proper attribution to cellar.org this time).

This could get interesting.

The Pakistan garbage area/ferris wheel is also linked at Attu sees all.

Damn. New record users every couple minutes. Imagine if it were a weekday.

I'm glad for UT and the Cellar's rise to fame, but it sure makes it hard for us regulars to do much on the board - especially if you just have stupid old dial-up like I do.

What is UT? Is it the reason I keep getting bumped off? I don't understand this coded language. :headshake

Ah, I see... That's why...

Right sorry all, this is just about the modern equivalent of a denial of service attack. Double-farked, Boing'd, Attu'd, all at the same time... the whole thing would be permanently down except that I'm basically stopping and starting the web server every 30 minutes to untangle it.

So, if the cellar continues to rise to this level of fame, will you have to buy more band width to deal with it, UT? How does that work?

We have plenty of bandwidth, it's just the thousands of connections to the web server and database and it's only a problem for today, when the links are really flying in. If I'd have known, I would have optimized for it and we probably would have been ok. There are tricks one can do to improve speed.

Yes, but look on the bright side. As an established user you can hire yourself out as a "Cellar consultant":D.

If the Cellar ever closes to new users, maybe we can sell our Cellar accounts like seats on the stock exchange.:yelgreedy

There is no better way to make money in the US than to tell people they can't have something.

Heh! I bet UT's hair went white when he read that one! :lol:

Congratulations UT and thanks for the explanation. I'm glad AGers aren't to blame this time ;P

slang and i will be rich!............ rich I say!........... Rich!

OOOH! Everyone get busy creating sock puppets! ;)

Boing Boing'd against tonight, this time the foam pictures. We rebooted about ten minutes ago but things are going well now.

Web geekery: I think the reboot cleaned some things up, but also helping is the fact that I've put the pictures on another system and are hosting them there instead of here. This is load balancing on the cheap: since there are over 500K of images, let's have another machine serve them while this machine manages the forum and everything else.

Thank's UT, I was wondering why I got knocked off. Came back from looking at a link and everything was frozen. :D

Tried to post this and got, "The server is too busy at the moment. Please try again later." Wheeee.

I haven't been able to get on until just now. Maybe its because all I have is stupid dial-up. :(

Your "load balancing" sounds like a good plan. Everbody wins more or less.

Wow. It's slow. Can't do anything.

Currently Active Users: 909 (3 members and 906 guests)

Still pretty bad conecting from this side of the pond - 7 0r 8 attempts to get here

Same from way down here Cyclefrance

WTF , Friday a fiber optic cable gets back hoe'd some where so No cell phones , or long distance land lines , and no NET , ( this is about the 3rd time in 10 years )
Sat The celler gets Farked and Boinged
Then again Yesterday nite , now things are slow !!!!

Its a Communist Plot I tell ya !!!!!!!

I kept trying to access the cellar from Oz, but I kept getting the "too busy" thing. I thought it was just my connection from there, but I got it at home too.
Oh well.... looks like all's ok for the moment.

Yes it's very slow for pages to turn this am.

Metafiltered yesterday...

See, when we got FARKed, they pointed to the blog view, which is better. It requires fewer database lookups. It also made like $3 in ad revenue that day (typically about $15/month). This time they are pointing to the thread, which means the whole system has to work harder to resolve the page.

I've made a few adjustments so that the system will just become slow, and not stop responding altogether, when these things happen. There are a lot of other performance tricks I could implement - unfortunately some of them would remove features of the forum software, so right now I'm just hoping this is temporary.

I have applied all the performance tuning I possibly can to the forum... We hit a new record number of users about a half hour ago and we can actually handle a few hundred more, I think. The thread has been not only boing'd and metafiltered, but also fazed, attu'd, i-am-bored'd, is on jwz's weblog, many myspace pages and countless little forums and whatnot.

They are HAMMERING us, with like 5 incoming new requests per second. Remember the actual images are hosted on another server, so each of the nine requests for the images and the bandwidth for those is sent by another machine.

It's kinda cool though.

Luckily Fark linked to the Strategypage gallery or it would be all over... the server would have melted by now

Did I jinx us by commenting in the foam thread on all the great bandwidth the Cellar has now? The internet gods rained slings and arrows on our heads for my hubris.

Actually, yes -- I think some places consider that sort of thing when they link. I know Fark does. If every single server they link to gets crushed, why link at all?

Oops.:redface:

But it's not a bad thing. Why build it, if it can't withstand being popular?

Damn, UT. Next the internet groupies will be beating a path to your door.:mg:

Actually, when I sent you those pictures, it was for your entertainment. I thought there would be too many for IOtD.