Earthquakes Shake Servers, Too

Michael Buhrley writes "I felt a pretty good earthquake this afternoon in Tokyo. I immediately went to the Japan Weather Association earthquake information page to see if it had registered the quake, which it had not (the ground was still shaking at this point.) 20 seconds later when I refreshed the page the server had slowed to a crawl. I had been looking at traffic graphs for one of my servers earlier and thought it would be neat to correlate the traffic data with the seismic data for the event. I wonder how quickly a noticeable traffic spike could be detected and what other information could be gleaned from the web behavior. Lots of traffic = big quake or quake in big city. The U.S.G.S. Pasadena Field Office has a page that compares this phenomenon to the Slashdot effect."

Quake

[pcbob]

Comparison to slashdot doesn't do us /.ers justice. Just wait till the next Quake(tm) comes out, and they'll see what a network crawl really is about...

Let me get this straight

[Samus]

So let me get this straight. You were feeling an earthquake. While it was still going on you went to a web site to see if you were really feeling an earthquake instead of seeking some kind of shelter? Thats way more geek than me.

5-7-5

[rodentia]

the earth is moving
server room epicenter
earthquake or slashdot?

other events could be monitored

[Hubert_Shrump]

Bet you could set this up so that it'd give you an alert level summation.

Like, say if CNN is getting pounded you could have it look around and find what else is getting hits: earthquake, DOI info sites, NOAA...

You might be able to get a disaster level and possibly related causation out of it.

Disaster level: red
Possible breaking news: microsoft.com, slashdot.org, theregister.co.uk

(had to get the anti-MS in there somewhere...)

Slashquake

[sethaw]

Now that slashdot has linked to the site, I expect that their site will now experience alot of hits. As a result of a spike in hits, they will assume that their has been another earthquake (since alot of page hits=earthquake!). Panic will result since they will know there is an earthquake but nobody locate it. I name this effect the slashquake effect.