About The Site

During the fires this past week, it became necessary for us to ask everyone to reduce unnecessary traffic and demand on the system. The rapid increase in demand caused the site to become unacceptable for many. There is always a reaction by some, demanding that we increase our capacity. Some even have said that we are "worthless in an emergency because the site always goes down". One even said that for $20 he would teach us how to handle the problem -- without any knowledge of how our system is set up or the demand we face. I will counter that comment by saying our history has proven that the site crashes at times because we are NOT worthless in an emergency. We are the first place people turn for information.

I hope the following will illustrate what we encounter when there is an emergency event.

The following graphs are from a third-party source that monitors established websites and their traffic. Below you will see the normal traffic load at the bottom and to the very right the spike from the fire this last weekend.

   


To put that in perspective, the graph below will show the fire this last weekend (right) to the spike in traffic of the 2007 wildfires (left) and the normal traffic rate.

   


Think of the site as a freeway. The site’s servers are designed to handle about double the average traffic load. When something major happens, like a fire, the traffic spikes as people from all over start to get word of the fire and there is a flood of new traffic, all trying to come down the on-ramps onto the freeway at the same time. There are only so many lanes on the freeway and traffic begins to slow, and then stop.

Folks can't get their browser to load and they keep hitting the refresh key. "Why won’t this thing load?” Click. Click. Click. Every one of those clicks adds one more request to the buffer and increases the load even more, now multiply that by a few thousand and you get the idea.

The next response that always comes is, "Well… add more band width, bigger servers, and so on". That sounds easy, but I can tell you that in order to handle our current load, we have tripled our server capacity since 2007; but we also add several hundred new users every month. We have not been able to add as many new advertisers. We’re not Google or Amazon with a seemingly unlimited operation’s budget. (Our monthly server costs are equal to some folk’s house payment.) Advertising is how we pay for what you see on ROTW -- the servers, news, alerts, payroll etc. Unfortunately, in this economy, advertising is the first thing many businesses cut when things are tight.

If we start shutting down some services on the site, we can increase the number of people who can view the pages at one time. So in an emergency, once the traffic reaches a point where we cannot handle it, we will begin to switch to an emergency mode by shutting off some features. In an event like the 2007 fires, the only thing that will be online is the news. This is not a light switch and takes some time to implement. During that time, the site may be off line for a while as we switch over.

You can help us by taking some of the chitchat to other places, like Facebook for example, while we are dealing with an emergency.

You can help by not going click… click… click… “Why wont the site load?” Click… click....

You can also continue to get updates on http://twitter.com/rotwnews and http://twitter.com/rotwalerts, or through the ROTW club alerts feature - http://www.rimoftheworld.net/club.

Thank you, Dave. I think the majority of us understand these basic concepts. Of course it will always be the few who don't who will make the most noise. Hopefully, they will now have a better understanding

I have no issues waiting a few to get good information. We all know the LA news is worthless. The local papers are totally worthless. The Sun may have one report a day, not exactly up to date.

During the Oak Glen Fire, there were quite a few people who jumped on Facebook. I was there as were several other ROTW transcribers. We didn't transcribe, but we kept the news coming on the ROTW.net facebook page. That worked out fairly well. We have an internal chat where we were informed that ROTW was back up, and we went back. Most of the transcribers have Facebook accounts and I know I'll probably be on there if ROTW goes down.

yes that was cool Peg , im glad we had a secondary source