innismir.net » bandwidth http://www.innismir.net Pointless, vapid ramblings of a surly information security engineer Mon, 02 Aug 2010 20:06:55 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 How not to design high traffic websites http://www.innismir.net/article/7 http://www.innismir.net/article/7#comments Fri, 04 Jan 2008 18:20:22 +0000 Ben Jackson So, like other hard core political junkies, I was watching the election results of the Iowa Caucus last night trying to get the latest results. I went to surf around 8:45PM EST, looking to get the results trickling in.

The Iowa Democratic Party website was zippy, automatically updating, and from what I can tell, AJAXified.

The Iowa Republican Party website… Well… Not so much.

Apparently my fellow political junkies flooded the Iowa GOP website off the tubes. I’m seeing some more frazzled SysAdmin who thought “Hmmm! Two T1s and a server should be find for my flash heavy, graphically intensive website!” and then cowering when hundreds of thousands of users descended onto his or her server.

Meanwhile, the Iowa Democratic website had the foresight to realize how many people will be clamoring to get to the data. They put a streamlined results page on, and moved it to Amazon’s S3 service which saw our requests and laughed as we made hardly a dent in their bandwidth. I think someone reads Jeff Atwood.

The end result is that I was on the Iowa Democratic Website almost all night, and had to turn to other sources to get the GOP results. Way to go guys.

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