zOwie Omega Discussion Forum

Bandwidth can usually be added rather quickly if they're at a decent host (who knows if they're hosting it themselves) Usually the host provides the bandwidth then sends you a bill at month's end.

On an int'l site, usually, the bottleneck is the load-balancing box or the one doing Big-IP (a service that redirects a client to another server more 'geographically-local' to the requests' origin) - a friend of mine was a web-sys-admin for Gannet/USA Today- they were proud to be the only 'daily' that didn't hiccup during Princess Diana's death, so he shared his 'secrets' to their ability to handle spikes in traffic...

I saw a few pages spouting ODBC errors. Looks like the backend to their (dynamic) site is what's bad, or the code calling it has erros.

I have noticed that the 'subsections' in the left nav column change in order from day to day- so that points to them changing the code from day to day.

Usually, one does this on a second non-production system, you test, THEN go live... and as you note, you don't make these kinds of changes at the busiest time of the year ! :)

: Yes, I've been experiening that too. Very
: unprofessional. I am guessing that they
: simply did not pay for enough bandwidth to
: handle the amount of traffic to respond to
: all hits from people seeking info for
: holiday presents.