Martin at Press Gazette has spotted something interesting: The Times website suffered under load this morning, and so visitors were directed to the Typepad-hosted blogs instead. Following The Telegraph's problems earlier in the week, this does beg the question: why don't more publishers take their hosting infrastructure as seriously as hosted service provider like Six Apart have to?
After all, availablity of sites is absolutely vital to most publishing businesses. There's a whole raft of technologies including Memcached that can be used to ease this sort of load pain, developed for high-volume traffic environments like blog hosting.
January 4, 2008 2:50 PM | Reply
The quick answer is probably that 'scaling is hard.' ;-) SixApart has done a pretty stellar job but its target for performance optimization is also a lot more focused than most news or social networking sites. A lot of the functionality thats demanded (at least by decision-makers, if not users) on those broader sites tends to confound he easy performance wins.
While it has drawbacks in many other areas, Movable Type and TypePad's publish-to-static files system also constitutes a built in performance optimization for unchanging read-only content like newspaper columns. TypePad's crashed a few times itself, and the ripples were felt all around the net. I know I was sadly more productive for a day. ;)
That said, we've just added memcached to the mix on the under-development redesign of FastCompany.com and we saw the number of requests per second the site could serve jump by -- no joke -- two orders of magnitude. When leveraged properly, it's an amazing piece of work...
January 4, 2008 2:54 PM | Reply
While I'm sure you're right that scaling is hard, so's producing good content and selling advertising and...
In of itself, "it's hard" is not much of an excuse. A conflict of priorities does make more sense, but really, just being up should be pretty darn high on that priority list.
Looking forward to the Fast Company redesign by the way...
January 4, 2008 3:19 PM | Reply
Oh, totally. It's definitely not an excuse for a weak system. I was thinking more in terms of the requirements for a large-scale news site versus the smaller 'surface' of something like TypePad.
I'm looking forward to seeing it, too! it's been a long, long-running project and we've been there for a small slice of it, mostly related to Drupal architecture and performance tuning.