said by nklb:
Considering how many people visit news sites, even those who have dial up modems, it is surprising the problems weren't even worse.
Most news sites use the services of Akamai (or a similar company). If you're not familiar with it, Akamai is a content distribution service/company. Basically, if you pull up a web page, a significant amount of the content for that web page might be located on Akamai servers located around the 'net. This pulls much of the load off of the main web servers of the news sites and distributes it across the thousands of web servers that Akamai maintains on various networks around the 'net. To take Yahoo! as an example. When you pull up a Yahoo! web page, the main html is pulled off of Yahoo!'s web servers, but the images, icons, and other static content is loaded off of Akamai's servers.
We are a fairly small network in the overall scheme of things, but we have an Akamai cluster (2 content servers, one management server) on our network here at IgLou. This benefits IgLou because all of the Akamaized content is pulled off of Akamai's web servers here on our network for our customers, rather than having all of our customers pull the same data across our upstream connections from Akamai servers out on the 'net someplace. It helps Akamai because it helps get their content distributed closer to the edge and prevent any of their larger, main clusters from getting too overloaded.
Now, you may ask why I mention all of this...
One of Akamai's founders and CTO was on American Airlines flight 11 that crashed into the World Trace Center Tower 1.
One of the sad ironies of this tragedy, that one of this man's creations was largely responsible for getting the word spread about the very event that brought about his own death.
Jeff
