

Web slows after Jackson's death - niyazpk
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8120324.stm

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chaosmachine
Did the BBC really just use "Fail" as a one word sub-header?

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scott_s
Indeed. Which either means the meme can now die, or it's part of our language.

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zimbabwe
I'll vote for part of the language. Something this widespread isn't a meme.

As an English dick, I'm fine with "Fail". It's simple and to-the-point. Much
better than "Fmylife" or similar flippant things.

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niyazpk
I wonder what big scale incident will be so important and newsworthy that it
would bring the web completely to a halt.

If the likes of twitter and Google were prominent when 9/11 happened, that
would have caused big enough congestion in all the networks worldwide.

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chaosmachine
Google was pretty prominent when 9/11 happened. Most major news sites went
down. Google actually mirrored a copy of cnn.com and linked it on the front
page of Google.com under the search box. As far as I remember, Google itself
never went down.

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mschwar99
I remember the major American news sites like cnn.com and msnbc.com becoming
more or less swamped and unreachable by the late morning of 9/11. They came
back a little while later with static, text only versions of their home pages
for the rest of the day.

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niyazpk
That is a very good point to remember when designing high traffic web
applications. Add the functionality to switch the site to just text mode on
the occasion of overwhelming traffic like the ones described above.

Any pointers on how to do this?

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whughes
Stop serving images? Obviously creating a text-only template is best, like
another poster said, but the images are going to be the biggest drain.
Simplifying your layout could help if you are under huge strain, but not as
much as removing images.

