My brother, Jay Barnson, made the front page of Slashdot today. That means that I may be shutting down other services — including this personal web site — if traffic gets too high.
Anyway, I’m really excited on his behalf. The Slashdot article is Why Game Developers Go Rogue, while the original article on The Escapist is Going Rogue. Check it out!
Good On Jay!
Not sure how Jay’s article, without direct link or reference to his blog, would end up causing spike here?
Ending blurb
Yeah, after going over his article in detail, it turns out the only link to his personal website is in his credit at the end of the article. Few people clicked it, but when you’re talking about an audience of millions, overall traffic is up 1000% of usual right now 🙂 Still plucking along merrily, though.
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Matthew P. Barnson
Throttle?
Can’t you throttle bandwidth instead of shutting it down? Or limit access to only logged-in users in times of high access?
In other words, don’t take away my barnson.org!!!! 😉
My $.02 Weed
Throttling…
My main worry was memory. You see, if we run more than 100 simultaneous connections, Apache has gobbled up most of the available RAM on the system. Shortly thereafter, we go into swap, and thus begin the short spiral into total meltdown. Thus you see that bandwidth throttling would actually make the situation worse, by leaving more open connections that take longer to complete.
So I need to reevaluate how we handle connections. Squid, for instance, or thttp, use very little memory per connection, but are very limited in what they can do. I’m thinking a front-end proxy, like Squid, may be ideal for fronting most connections. Users that aren’t logged in won’t necessarily get the very latest page, but it would handle high-connection-count situations.
I’ve known for years I need to implement something like that; maybe fear of Slashdotting might motivate me to move into more high-availability thinking for my personal web site 😉
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Matthew P. Barnson
Jay Is The Bomb
We’re getting away from the main point of this thread, which is that Jay is the bomb. I like a guy who has dedicated his life to one thing and is committed to his pursuit of excellence in that one thing. Even though I’m not a gamer myself, and frankly think video games in general are a waste of time, I appreciate how he blogs every day with zest and thoughtfulness.