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Networking (Apple) Businesses Hardware Apple

MacWorld Expo Traffic Analysis 296

Posted by timothy from the surface-level-only dept.
Bioanarchism writes "MacWorld Expo has been the receiving end of the brute force of the Internet surfers. Netcraft also reports on the Internet traffic that other Apple websites have gotten since Steve Jobs gave the opening keynote." The Windows Server 2003-based MacWorld Expo site folded under all those hits, while Apple's sites, running Mac OS X, were only knocked into sluggishness. (Server load is a complex thing, of course -- more complicated than what OS is on the servers.)
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MacWorld Expo Traffic Analysis More

MacWorld Expo Traffic Analysis

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  • After all, the servers were down for a good period of time during the speech. I know I couldn't get on www.apple.com
    • Perhaps someone has a mirror of the speech ?

    • Re:Probably slightly dodgy (Score:5, Informative)

      by daveschroeder ( 516195 ) * on Wednesday January 12, 2005 @10:15AM (#11334333)
      www.apple.com was up, reachable, and quick during the ENTIRE keynote. store.apple.com was "closed".

      After the keynote, once all the new products got posted, www.apple.com slowed down, but was always consistently reachable (I had to collect product information, specs, and photography). store.apple.com performed very poorly for about the first 15 minutes, was closed periodically, and then performed well from about a half hour after the keynote on.

      So this isn't "dodgy" at all; I know for an absolute fact that www.apple.com was reachable at what I would consider its "normal" performance during the entire keynote. Of course, that doesn't really matter, since it's AFTER the keynote (when information is actually posted) that matters; but then, too, it was reachable (albeit slower).

      • You are slightly dodgy (Score:3, Insightful)

        by mrklin ( 608689 )
        > www.apple.com was up, reachable, and quick during the ENTIRE keynote (snip) I know for an absolute fact that www.apple.com was reachable at what I would consider its "normal" performance during the entire keynote.

        Are you sure?

        Here are tons of people, myself included, telling you that Apple.com was not reachable. And here is you - one guy who got in but knows "for an absolute fact" that the site was good. Should we believe one person's experience or what the rest of the us actually experienced?

        I

  • Huh? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by lemonylimey ( 745130 ) on Wednesday January 12, 2005 @10:13AM (#11334309)
    I don't know what site you were looking at, but the Apple Store was certainly out of action for the best part of yesterday.
    • It wasn't completely out of action, I could pull up the website here in VA and the only thing that didn't come up were the images. All the text was there, however.
    • I was finally able to get my order in around 6pm eastern time. Up until that point, store.apple.com was definitely unresponsive.

      Like I posted the other day, I was looking at a Power Mac this past weekend, but the $2800 price (without a monitor!) was a bit much. The Mac mini is much better priced for my first Mac. I'm really looking forward to using it.

      Normally I stay away from add-on warranties, but I went ahead and got the Apple Care package for it. I figure it's an entirely new model and there may
    • Word is that it was taken down intentionally to revise the stock.... I guess. Seems to me that if you were planning for this all along, you would've had the thing automated behind the scenes with no interruption.
    • I left it to spin and after about 5 minutes it came up, complete with images. So it wasn't down. Just bandwidth saturation, by the looks of it.

    • Re:Huh? (Score:3, Funny)

      by Halo1 ( 136547 )
      Now that you've posted your comment, you might want to read the story to get the answer.

  • So... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Walkiry ( 698192 ) on Wednesday January 12, 2005 @10:13AM (#11334311) Homepage
    >(Server load is a complex thing, of course -- more complicated than what OS is on the servers.)

    So why present it in such a flamebaiting way?
    • Apple shuts down their store during the keynote. I think it had a few issues coming back up though. I ordered my Mac Mini fine tho'.

    • Re:So... (Score:5, Informative)

      by frankie ( 91710 ) on Wednesday January 12, 2005 @10:52AM (#11334788) Journal
      Ask Netcraft, they're the ones who brought it up:

      The Apple web site, which runs on Mac OS X, experienced some slowdowns but was largely available. Apple's online store (also on Mac OS X) struggled, however, experiencing outages and lengthy response times. Faring even worse was the official site for MacWorld Expo, which runs on Windows Server 2003, and was offline for hours following the show's keynote address by Apple CEO Steve Jobs.


      Timothy actually read the article before posting the story. You should be happy about that.
    • Just think about it for a minute:
      *Apple* MacWorld event almost killed *Microsoft* Windows Server 2003-based site.

      Mwa-ha-ha! :)

    • that's obvious (Score:2, Insightful)

      by twitter ( 104583 )
      why present it [obvious performance difference] in such a flamebaiting way?

      The real question is why the submitter had to act like there was some other reason for the difference. Oh yeah, unless you bend over backward and consider all software equal, or everything inferior to M$, you are a Zealot.

      Sorry, but reality is not always what the Microsoft PR department wants. The Netcraft people did not mince words.

      What happens when hordes of Mac enthusiasts stress-test Apple and Microsoft products in head-t

    • Maybe because there is neither a reason why the Expo site would have anyway near the traffic of the Apple sites, nor why it should still be down.

  • Not a fair comparison of OSs (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 12, 2005 @10:14AM (#11334317)
    It doesn't really seem fair to compare the servers for the conference with Apple's corporate website. I'd expect a corporate website to be able to cope with huge loads, whatever OS it's running.

  • Complex thing, yeah... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    It may be a "complex thing". However, there is a very simple statistic (that is, # of hits on each site) which the posting leaves out.

    This is the modern "complexity" diversion tactic: "It looks like Y causes X. However, X is very complex."

    This causes the reader, ideally, to forget about the idea of finding other simple causes of X. For shame.
    • Not quite... compare 1 hit from site A vs. site B (below)

      site A:
      <html>
      Hello World!
      <\html>

      site B:
      <?
      while $i < 999999999 {echo "I suck bandwith!<br>";}
      ?>

      for those who don't know PHP, Site B would produce a very large file to be transmitted, while Site A would be tiny.
      Add in seperate image servers and database servers and all the cross-communication versus having a single Apache or IIS server handle the works... it does get more complicated (foo).

  • akamai? (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 12, 2005 @10:15AM (#11334331)
    The apple.com website is mirrored worldwide by Akamai which uses over 2,000 Linux servers, so I don't think you derive much insight about Mac OS X from the sites relative performance yesterday.

    • Re:akamai? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by chialea ( 8009 )
      I was told (by someone who should know) that Apple only has the images Akamaized, and they always serve the html themselves. They really did have a heck of a bottleneck in there.

      Lea

      • Re:akamai? (Score:4, Informative)

        by frankie ( 91710 ) on Wednesday January 12, 2005 @11:10AM (#11334989) Journal
        You don't have to take someone's word for it, you can see the packets for yourself.

        www.apple.com maps (forwards and backwards) to 17.254.0.91, in Apple's good old class A netblock (aka /8), AS714 [google.com].

        OTOH, images.apple.com points to Akamai's horde of Edge servers, which includes two addresses within my local network (YMMV).
    • But what about store.apple.com? That is probably not going thru Akamai, as Akamai is primarily geared towards serving static and mostly-static content.

      Chip H.

  • Apple store couldn't take my order (Score:5, Informative)

    by SamSeaborn ( 724276 ) on Wednesday January 12, 2005 @10:16AM (#11334346)
    I was so jazzed about the new Mac Mini, I went straight to the online Apple store to buy one. Only I couldn't access the store.

    I went back a couple hours later and I could add one to my cart, but couldn't complete the transaction.

    Hours after that, my "impulsiveness" subsided and I have re-thought if I really want to spend that money.

    So it looks like Apple may have lost a sale due to an inadequate web server.

    Sam

    • Re:Apple store couldn't take my order (Score:4, Interesting)

      by mikeplokta ( 223052 ) on Wednesday January 12, 2005 @11:32AM (#11335291)
      And it's probably more cost effective to lose some impulse buys the day a shiny new product is announced than it is to spend many hundreds of thousands of dollars on beefing up the website to cope with traffic levels that it only gets for one day per year. Assuming they make $100 margin on the Mac Mini, they'd need to sell an awful lot of impulse buys to impatient people to justify spending $1 million on the site.
    • OK, the site was having problems and couldn't take your order? Then use the PHONE. I called and punched a couple of numbers, then was *immediately* put in touch with a live person. This is about 30 minutes after the keynote ended and I had reviewed, then decided what Mac mini configuration I wanted. I even got a small discount.

      With a SuperDrive, Bluetooth 2.0 + Airport Extreme, 512MB RAM (will probably crack open and put in a 1GB module), an 80GB drive, and .Mac (for antivirus and etc.) it came to $999

  • um... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by fizban ( 58094 ) <fizban@umich.edu> on Wednesday January 12, 2005 @10:17AM (#11334360) Homepage
    Server load is a complex thing, of course -- more complicated than what OS is on the servers.

    Then why did you bring it up and only mention what servers they were running?
    • Then why did you bring it up and only mention what servers they were running?

      Because that's all they knew and all they could say. OSX up, OSX up and sluggish, M$ down all day. That's the news, and it's a common story.

      Worms are another complex and common story.

      Microsoft competitors software not working on Microsoft OS are another complex and common story.

      BSA raids are another complex and common story.

      When you look into the details of these complex stories you usually find something unflattering to Mi

  • Not even a G5... (Score:5, Funny)

    by The-Bus ( 138060 ) on Wednesday January 12, 2005 @10:17AM (#11334369)
    You know what's really embarassing?

    The Windows Server 2003-based Macworld Expo site folded under all those hits, while Apple's sites, running Mac OS X, were only knocked into sluggishness.


    To prove a point, Jobs had Apple's sites all run in a single Mac Mini. iTunes has been running on a daisy chain of seven iPod Shuffles.

  • unusable (Score:5, Insightful)

    by bmetz ( 523 ) on Wednesday January 12, 2005 @10:18AM (#11334373) Homepage
    If by "only knocked into sluggishness" you mean "dropping 80% of the HTTP requests sent to it, making the site unusable for commerce", then sure, apple's store held up just fine.
    • That was the store (store.apple.com).

      The main web site (www.apple.com) was fine (albeit slow) after the keynote.

      But yeah, the store performed very poorly and was essentially unusable for about the first half-hour, was closed briefly, and then was fine from about the first hour on.

  • Ahhh.... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Marthisdil ( 606679 )
    Yet another MS hater having to spread his FUD with implied meanings....
    • Do you even know what FUD stands for? It is certain and there is no doubt that Microsoft's 2003 crashed under the pressure and OSX did not. Where is the fear? Where is the uncertainty? And where is the doubt?

    • Turnabout is fair play.
    • FUD? FUD about MS? What do you mean?

      F = Fear

      You are afraid of something if you don't know what to expect. With MS stuff you pretty much do know. It's so omnipresent no-one can fully evade it and people know their bad and better sides from personal experiences.

      U = Uncertainty

      You mean I, having read the article, would be uncertain whether to use or not MS product as a server? Boo.. I'm _certain_ I won't use it for anything remotely important by my own good will if I want to do my job well because _certain
  • I managed to get onto the Apple sites new pages for the Shuffle and the Mac Mini around 7pm ish, I PDFed them and put them on my poor poor adsl webserver for others to get at, since the site was so slow (##mwsf-chat on freenode). My poor webserver took 67,000 hits in just over 6 hours last night for those files and the Mac Mini images.

  • What to do? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by RobertTaylor ( 444958 ) <roberttaylor1234 ... com minus distro> on Wednesday January 12, 2005 @10:25AM (#11334461) Homepage Journal
    What should sites like this do?

    Do they need to spend to cope with once yearly spikes in traffic or just let the sites fall over - which in itself creates a 'story' and free advertising.

    It seems with most 'big' news online there is always a secondary story regarding the number of visits to the website, and usually the event is seen as bigger if the webservers crash and burn under the load...

  • Coincidence? (Score:4, Funny)

    by af_robot ( 553885 ) on Wednesday January 12, 2005 @10:32AM (#11334545)
    The Windows Server 2003-based Macworld Expo site folded under all those hits, while Apple's sites, running Mac OS X, were only knocked into sluggishness.

    Yea, and i'm sure the fact that author linked Macworld Expo site from a slashdot article just a *pure coincidence* :)
  • > Windows ... folded
    > Mac OS X ... only sluggishness
    > Server load is a complex thing, of course -- more complicated than what OS is on the servers.

    But hey, here on Slashdot we'll take any excuse to bash Microsoft and applaud Apple!

  • Not Just Apple, but fan-sites as well... (Score:5, Informative)

    by PipianJ ( 574459 ) on Wednesday January 12, 2005 @10:39AM (#11334634)
    Heavy bandwidth usage tends to be a very normal occurrence on fansites at any rate. For a while now, Apple Rumors [macrumors.com] and MacNN [macnn.com] switch to low-bandwidth versions during the keynote, and even these sites were swamped.

    MacRumors was pretty much down after iWork was announced.

    MacNN had a 403 between when iDVD was discussed and when the Mac Mini was mentioned.

    Mac Teens performed the best, but started to get intermittent towards the end (probably due to a cascade effect of people fleeing from one working site to another)

    Engadget was fairly unreliable, but a little better off than MacNN.

  • Yawn, (Score:5, Informative)

    by chrome ( 3506 ) <chrome AT stupendous DOT net> on Wednesday January 12, 2005 @10:41AM (#11334655) Homepage Journal
    OK, so there was a single server hosting macworld's site, and Apple have 1000 xserves behind some load balancers?

    I mean come on people. How much *money* you spend on your net infrastructure dictates how well it will
    survive.

    Apple spent enough, Macworld didn't. Get over it. Why is this a story?

    • Re:Yawn, (Score:4, Insightful)

      by mattgreen ( 701203 ) on Wednesday January 12, 2005 @12:44PM (#11336322)
      It's a story because we can all talk about how our favorite operating system could handle infinite load as if we had any experience in the matter!

  • Akamai... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by mstefanus ( 705346 ) on Wednesday January 12, 2005 @10:43AM (#11334672)
    Even with the help of Akamai (I presume) the keynote quicktime stream was problematic. I couldn't watch it without frames dropping and sound going away. Time outs were often... a real pain. Increasing the buffer, using TCP instead of UDP did not help either.

    If I remember correctly it wasn't like this last year... I guess Apple created a lot of buzz this time.
  • I can stream the speech, but is there a download available anywhere? It's the kind of thing I might put on the laptop whilst on the train, but am unlikely to sit through during the evening at home.

    Cheers,
    Ian

  • If somebody doesn't make a Netcraft joke soon I'll just die.
  • ... but why would the MacWorld Expo be using Windows Server 2003 rather than Mac OS X Server? It's not like they don't have the contacts to do so, and it kind of defeats the the whole purpose of the expo which is to promote the Macintosh.

  • A new converter (Score:4, Insightful)

    by AstroDrabb ( 534369 ) on Wednesday January 12, 2005 @11:49AM (#11335520)
    Well, I am now pushing my wife to let me get a new Mac Mini (she says I have too many computers). I wasn't an Apple fan till I watch the Mac Expo last night (though I never hated Apple, I just never used their products).

    I do 95% of my programming at work on MS Windows systems, and after watching the Mac Expo, I think it would be a real joy to come home and use a Mac. While I am not a Steve groupie, I have to say that the guy is 1,000x more "cool" then Bill G was during the CES show MS did. Bill was so stiff and dry, now I know why MS brought in that late night talk show host, to try to bring some life to the show. Bill G. made the keynote as exiting to watch as paint drying.

    In contrast, Steve was cracking jokes and made watching actually fun. Steve had a small systems glitch, just like Bill/MS did. However, Steve paused for a moment, and then said, "this is why we have backups", flipped a KVM switch and had another Mac ready to roll in on second, and the show went on smooth-as-silk.

    The demos were actually very good, and I was surprised to see Steve do them all, well except for the Pages demo. Bill's demo of the new media center was _very_ boring, and when the remote didn't work, they had no backup system and just "moved along", the same thing happened when their XBox blue-screened. Come on MS, get a little style and maybe next time take a tip from Apple and have a backup system.

    I am looking forward to the Mac Mini and iLife 05. The only thing I wish the Mac Mini had was more video memory. 32MB is a little low for todays standards and it doesn't look like you can upgrade the video. Other then that, it looks like a great system. Maybe the Mac Mini can hook my wife on Apple and she won't complain when I try to buy a G5 box. ; P

    • Bill's demo of the new media center was _very_ boring

      Still it was better than Steve's demo of the Apple Media Center, because there isn't one. They're 2 years behind the rest of the field in the living room convergence market, which coincidentally is also the market I'm shopping in.

      Maybe in a few more years, Apple will catch up, just like they've finally gotten around to offering small Flash-based MP3 players like other companies were doing back in the '90s. Or maybe Microsoft will have established mar
  • Why were they running on Windows in the first place? They probably don't know how to properly configure Windows anyway.
  • My gut reaction to the announcement was that the lack of live webcast was due to political reasons. Jobs (and Apple) are rightly pissed at the mac rumor sites releasing trade secrets, preliminary specs and prices, and stealing their thunder. As big as this expo was, coverage provided like the original Apple blueberry flavored iMac would have been huge. Instead they get pundits saying Apple "barely kept their head above level of expetations today" and crap like that. The rumor sites get a lot of their reven

    • Interesting that no one seems to have made note of what I thought was the most important announcement [prnewswire.com] - iPod integration with the audio systems from several car manufacturers. I use iTunes but don't have an iPod. I would get one in a second if my car supported this feature.

      Another thought, what does this mean for satellite radio?

  • I had so much trouble using the configurator/online store to buy the MiniMac. This looks very promising, hopefully Apple builds market share to force itself to be more competitive AND force the other players to step up in the innovation department. Sadly, Microsoft usually keeps Apple in check. I wonder what the reaction in Redmond is to to iWorks and the MiniMac. Office:Mac is a very powerful card.
  • The Apple store kept dropping my connection when I tried to configure a Mac mini at home. A half an hour later, from the show floor, everything was snappy.

    I kindof wonder if Apple has a whole set of servers dedicated to connections coming from the show floor. So Steve's presentation stays snappy when he plays with the iTunes Music Store. Hell, maybe they have a whole set of servers physically at MacWorld, so they don't have to worry about internet connectivity while Steve does his thing.
  • MacWorldExpo.com is dead.

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