Gigabit for web servers (WAS )RE: [geeks] Big Blue Smoke

[David Cantrell]

On Fri, Apr 12, 2002 at 11:54:55AM -0400, Sridhar the POWERful wrote:
> On Fri, 12 Apr 2002, Fogg, James wrote:
> > So, are you running 40-50 million hits/hour? What entity is this?
> It wouldn't necessarily have to be that much.  It could be high-quality
> video, or giant database accesses or something.

Much of that 1.5Gbps was indeed video, and that was an unusually high
figure for us.  We normally push something like 550Mbps at our highest
point in the day.  But our networks and our server farms are designed
to handle unusual events like that, so we need to run with plenty of
head-room.  We also, as is good practice, try to engineer things so
that either one of our main hosting centres can take the entire load.
This was particularly useful when some nasty chaps crashed their plane
near Telehouse NY :-)

http://support.bbc.co.uk/support/network/
http://support.bbc.co.uk/support/mrtg/internet/

and they're even (mostly) up to date.

-- 
David Cantrell | david at cantrell.org.uk | http://www.cantrell.org.uk/david

  The test of the goodness of a thing is its fitness for use.  If it fails
  on this first test, no amount of ornamentation or finish will make it
  any better, it will only make it more expensive, more foolish.
     -- Frank Pick, lecture to the Design and Industries Assoc, 1916