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Server meltdown

2007-06-05 Tags: , , , , ,

My post on building a better soda can stove was a test run for my new blog engine. For some reason, it got a lot more attention than I was hoping for. In turn, it rose to the front page on Reddit, Del.icio.us, Digg, and Makezine. Oh my...

What happened exactly? I'm not sure but I will tell my side of the story. I run this website on my home DSL. I have an upload cap of 80 kb/s. This is not great but until now it was plenty enough. Once my new blogging engine was running, I did a few test with Apache bench to see how responsive it was. Everything was fine and it didn't require much CPU load to saturate my uplink. But it didn't feel right, this test was way too artificial. At 7h16, I submitted my howto to Reddit, just to see a real world traffic spike. I didn't expect much, maybe a few hundred hits before I was down voted into oblivion. Exactly seven seconds after hitting submit, I had my first visitor. Not bad, I thought. Then an other one, and an other one, and it kept pouring like that for 36 hours. As I write this, I have brief periods of sub-saturation for the first time.

HTTP Illustrated

2006-11-29 Tags: , , ,

In TCP/IP Illustrated, Richard Stevens describe the TCP/IP protocol stack by generating interesting situations and looking at what happens on the wire with tcpdump. Don't look for pretty illustrations, "illustrated" here means "by examples".

This is an excellent set of books, a bit dated but the technique lives on. Learning this stuff by just reading the RFCs must be painful. For some reason the RFC editors want the official documents to be plain ASCII with manual page breaks. For the nostalgic it must feel good to read document in 2006 that look exactly like a bunch of typewritten pages from 1966. The RFC editor even recommends using troff to "typeset" the document... Let's hope that they hear about Docbook one of these days. OK Docbook is not that nice, we can blame XML's verbosity for most of the problems and the rest of the blame goes to the extremely fragile tool chain that is considered "standard" on most GNU/Linux distributions. But at least with Docbook you can hack your own tool chain and you'll end up with stuff that don't look like crap.