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What’s up with the Missourian Web site, updated

So Google Analytics says at least a couple hundred people read this post about what happened to the Missourian Web site on Monday.

The 200 of you who represent a record day for my blog (thanks, all!) are about 28,800 fewer visitors than the Missourian got on Monday, in the 8 hours or so that the site was live. We normally get about 10,000 to 12,000 visits per day, so that was clearly a bit of an epic day for us. On Tuesday, our numbers slowed a bit to about 18,500 visits, and they seem to be slowing a bit more today. Of course, analytics code only counts visitors who can make it through to load a page, and so clearly those numbers are undercounting actual visitors.

That, in a nutshell, is what’s still up with the site. We’re getting more visits than our servers can handle (the greatest strain seems to be on our database server). We’re also getting offers for help from several people on campus, and taking them up on it when we can. Our programmer is working to restructure our database to more quickly load content, and is also working overtime clearing out dead connections, rebooting Apache when needed, and so on. Appreciate the patience as we work through it.

More updates as needed.

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By Rob – March 10, 2010

What happened to the Missourian?

Long day yesterday with the Columbia Missourian site up and down, but mostly down.

Here’s the basic explanation of what happened from our programmer, Noah Medling:

Our website runs on four physical servers: one for media (photos, videos, etc.), one for the database (articles, user permissions, almost everything textual in nature), and two webservers that take that information and assemble it into what you see in the browser.

There’s a load balancer that sits between you and the two webservers that alternately sends requests to one or the other, spreading the work across both as evenly as it can. If one of those servers stops functioning, it stops directing traffic to it and we run off of just one webserver until the other comes back online.

The load balancer was using HTTP response time to determine if a server was working or not. Our website is, as you probably know, not very fast, but they’re usually not so bad that the load balancer complains. This morning, around 8:00, one of the webservers stopped being responsive. The load balancer steered all of our traffic to the other one, which was now handling everything rather than just half, and we managed to get record amounts of traffic at the same time. This slowed down the remaining server to unacceptable levels and the load balancer took it offline, leaving us with no website.

I got here at 8:30 and worked on the problem constantly from then until it was finally resolved around 4:00. I never did figure out what happened to the first webserver, but I rewrote a sizable chunk of configuration code in resolving other issues, so it’s likely that whatever caused that problem in the first place no longer exists. Because the load balancer is outside of my control, it took a long time to discover that it was part of the problem. It has now been reconfigured to no longer take servers offline for being slow, and Rob and I now have contact information for a number of people in networking and CSG who have access to the parts that I don’t, and can help in getting this sort of thing resolved much faster in the future.

On top of that, we had a couple of other issues once it came back late yesterday:

Because the site was down pretty much all day, all its caches expired, so it took forever to re-cache items, leading to further slowness.

We were also being linked to from the Drudge Report, which was quite possibly the source of some of the heavy traffic from Monday morning (the story about cotton balls being dropped at the Black Culture Center on the MU campus).

At around 4:30 on Monday, for example, we had about 10,000 concurrent connections (our previous record was 7,000) to the site, which were a combination of Drudge traffic, search engines/bots and regular connections.

The good news, I suppose, is that our site was handling the traffic without completely crumbling. The bad news, of course, is that it was running ridiculously slowly in the meantime.

Anyhow, we’re slowly recovering and will hopefully have things running more speedily as time goes on. Thanks for being patient in the meantime.

Posted in Missourian, Web site.

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By Rob – March 9, 2010

Great slideshow on designing for the iPad

Stanford University’s Evan Doll, who teaches a class on iThing design, has a great slideshow on Slideshare about designing for the iPad. Take a look at it; it’s a lot smarter than what I can say here, but there are a few things he said that resonated with me from my time with eMprint.

Stanford CS193P – Designing for iPad

View more presentations from Evan Doll.

Here are some takeaways for me from his slideshow:
* Computers are still too complicated. The example he uses is that the /System/Library folder on a Mac has about 90,000 items which a typical user will never see/touch/interact with.
* Laptops and iPhones are antisocial. An iPad is shareable. (How many times have you tried to hand a friend your laptop to look at something? It’s hard.)
* Use the interface to help the user build a mental map of your app. (We found with eMprint that users often didn’t understand they could click on a summary to read an entire story.)
* Don’t abuse the screen size by making it look like Windows.

BTW, Doll and Alan Cannistraro’s class is available via iTunes (Link will open iTunes)

Posted in Computers, New media.

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By Rob – February 22, 2010

Looking forward to tomorrow’s Apple tablet announcement

Assuming there is one, of course. But signs point to yes. Gizmodo, as usual, has an awesome roundup of coverage here.

I wrote about this a while back, but an Apple tablet will be a major game-changer for e-readers and the e-book industry (as well as the associated industries who’ve hoped to cash in on e-readers, such as newspapers and magazines.

Just for the sake of clearing up terminology, an Apple tablet isn’t an e-reader, and vice versa. E-readers are basically screens that replicate ink on paper through the use of some e-ink technology. The battery life is great, you can read them in bright sunlight and they’re excellent for replicating printed pages. Arguments about them are over whether it’s better to provide them with some extra capabilities (wi-fi in the case of the Kindle) or less capabilities for better battery life (Plastic Logic, Sony) or whether size and weight matter, as in the Skiff. And, most importantly, there are no color options for e-ink now, though I’m told it’s coming.

So the takeaway is that e-readers have very limited functionality. They, basically, let you read stuff. A tablet computer — and Apple’s purported tablet is far from the first — is a computer, with all the functionality that implies. You can surf the Web, play games, create documents, chat with friends, etc. And, a tablet PC is also conveniently sized for reading and conveniently light and portable. The screen isn’t going to be great for reading in bright sunlight, but neither are current laptop screens. And when I’ve used my laptop outside, like other people, I find a shady spot.

In other words, if you’re faced with a choice between paying close to $400 for a reader, or around $1,000 or even $1,500 for a computer that does everything an e-reader does AND everything a computer does … well, that prices the e-reader straight out of the market.

Anyhow, now that we’re done with definitions. What’s changed since my last post is that the magazine industry, in particular, has become very interested in the possibilities that a full-color, video-capable tablet (as opposed to an e-reader) has. If you haven’t seen this yet, you should take a look at what Sports Illustrated is thinking of:

Now THAT’s functionality that could save the magazine industry.

Posted in Computers, New media, Newspapers.

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By Rob – January 26, 2010

Guardian’s History of the Internet project

This is a few days old, but if you haven’t seen it you really should spend a few minutes with it. The Guardian has created a “People’s History of the Internet,” and it’s a very cool project. Some of the fun facts: the first bulletin board system was developed during a Chicago blizzard in 1978; Usenet started in 1979 (and retains its homegrown charm); the first Webcam was set up to monitor a coffee pot at Cambridge University; etc.

What’s more interesting, however, is how the newspaper sourced its project. They asked ordinary readers to tell them what they found important about the Internet, and then supplemented it with interviews and video features with key people. So while an ordinary Guardian reader might think that Dave Hughes is important, the Guardian itself has the resources to track him down and interview him.

It’s something cool to think about when we consider the confluence of crowdsourced media, such as wikis, and contrast it with our desire to be accurate. This is a nice compromise — we let people tell us what’s important and then we flesh it out.

Anyhow, take a glance at the finished project. It’s worth the time.

Posted in New media, Newspapers.

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By Rob – November 6, 2009