
Debate: Can the Internet handle big breaking news? - aj
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10273854-93.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20
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SwellJoe
No! We clearly need television! And newspapers! And teletypes! And carrier
pigeons! And Paul Revere!

Twitter went down (which never happens!), so obviously, the Internet simply
can't handle the demands of delivering the news.

OK, I'm calmer now that I've got that out.

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moe
The whole article is just fluff and filler-text, not backed up by any facts
whatsoever.

He mentions a few _websites_ going down (which is not "the internet") and he
falsely claims google had trouble (which still wouldn't be "the internet" even
if it was true).

 _But this is a systemic problem with the Internet, or perhaps put more
accurately, the Web. The more people who demand the service provided by an
information Web site, the harder it gets for that site to provide that
information_

Yeah right. Actually that's a systemic problem with that particular website
then, not with the internet. He completely misses the point about the
distributed nature of the internet: "Big breaking news" spreads like wildfire
across many sites. So when CNN (not the internet) buckles under load then
there is a good chance that you'll still be able to fetch it from a few
thousand other sites.

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kierank
The _internet_ handled it fine. Certain websites didn't. An automatic scaling
system using something like Amazon Web Services and a lot of varnish caches
would have handled this fine. Unfortunately certain blogging platforms decide
to have dozens of queries per page which really slows things down.

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KaiP
"Even Google was unable to handle the load."

I was under the impression that Google's problem was due to an automated
attack response, not due to bandwidth issues.

Also, the article cited: <http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10273325-93.html>
has been updated to say that only CNN "appeared sluggish." It may be true that
the news on the Internet was crippled, but there's basically no hard evidence
suggesting it from the source he cited.

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sneakums
Well, the Internet services I used while I merrily ignored the vile circus
around Mr. Jackson's death all kept working great.

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akie
It just did...

