[BNM] Scaling Railway Websites

[Paul Booth]

Actually, when I was checking it (around 8am I think) even the main page at
http://www.nationalrail.co.uk/  wasn't working.


On 08/02/07, Dave Phelan <dave.phelan at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Folks,
>
> Anyone specialise in optimising sites for high demand?
> I figure you could make a good pitch to Southern after today.
> Their site www.southernrailway.co.uk had to be replaced with a
> placeholder, telling people to check
> http://www.nationalrail.co.uk/ldb/
> http://www.journeycheck.com/southern/
>
> The Live Departure Board was just blank (through
> http://www.nationalrail.co.uk/ was functioning) and The Journeycheck
> site is still working, but displaying the following banner:
> "Due to extreme demand for this service, we have switched to a simpler
> service - showing a summary of all incidents. The normal service will
> resume once demand has reduced sufficiently."
>
> How hard is it to design for peak loads, rather than average loads?
> There's plenty of good hardware solutions for managing content load
> balancing (there is a reason Sky News held up better on 2001-09-11
> than some other sites I could mention).
>
> Certainly, for a rail operator, when people really need to check if
> trains are running, shouldn't they be able to?
>
> Dave Ph
> --
> Dave Phelan CCIE#3590   ICQ: 50180416    GSM: +44 (0)7776 168561
> dave.phelan at gmail.com                  http://www.davephelan.org
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