punditry.ca — uncovering DSU elections

Wow.

What a day.

More in the wrap-up, but for now: you guys BROKE punditry.ca.  Twice.  My numbers show the server was running at 300% of its estimated capacity before its untimely demise.  It’s not running on a huge server, but it’s only role in life is to serve up a few web pages, exclusively for punditry.ca.

When I set up the server, I paid little-to-no attention to performance.  This is my fourth year at this, I know what the traffic looks like: a few thousand page views each day, spread throughout the whole day with a slight peak in the evening.  More was possible, but improbable.

Haha.

Not so much.

Because then crazy happened.

It was actually only about 50 page loads a minute sustained over an hour, but a few minor problems compounded into a situation that ended with me cutting the power to the server.  It’s a phenomenon broadly called thrashing.  Wikipedia has a crappy article about it, but if you’ve read Jurassic Park you’ll already be familiar with the concept as expressed in Ian Malcom’s iterations:

1. At the earliest drawings of the fractal curve, few clues to the underlying mathematical structure will be seen.
2. With subsequent drawings of the fractal curve, sudden changes may appear.
3. Details emerge more clearly as the fractal curve is redrawn.
4. Inevitably, underlying instabilities begin to appear.
5. Flaws in the system will now become severe.
6. System recovery may prove impossible.
7. Increasingly, the mathematics will demand the courage to face it’s implications.

And then BAM, a velociraptor eats you.

Anyway, too many visitors is a problem I’m happy to have, but not one that cursing at your monitor will solve, a fact I verified tonight as I tried to get the server to listen to me.

With the help of an experienced friend and a lot of experimentation, I think we’ve tamed it.  You might find it is a bit faster, but nothing else should be different (if it is, let me know).  Mostly, it has a higher capacity and in the worst-case will fail nicely instead of just dying.   If there’s a spike in visits, it will take pages a bit longer to load, but the server won’t die a horrible death.

Punditry.ca will be here to meet your future needs; do whatever you want, it can handle it.