Re: NY times appears to have had a rough morning..

[Phil Howard <phil () charon ipal net>]

Richard Irving wrote:

> Hrmm.. This sunday am I logged into www.nytimes.com,
> and got an unusual front page. Someone may want to take 
> a look......

Looks like the classical underconfigured/overloaded server to me.  They were
probably running with not much spare capacity before, or didn't configure the
correct number of listening processes (or enough RAM to handle them).

Possibly a SYN attack.  But on this date, more likely a demand "attack".

This is not unusual when you consider the total capacity is ultimately
determined by the suits.

FYI, I had no trouble pulling it from icreport.loc.gov.  I got it in the
evening, which would have been the 2nd demand curve for the day.  So server
capacity there was enough to deliver it in that probably broader hump.  But
maybe the masses, who normally go checking news sites and wouldn't recognize
a .gov site as even being an Internet thing, were clobbering places like
www.nytimes.com.  Even www.cnn.com seemed kinda slow to me.

-- 
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