Earthquakes Shake Servers, Too 32
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."
this already happens to the USGS webservers (Score:2, Interesting)
USGS (Score:2, Interesting)
I found the way that the USGS down in LA ended up implimenting Load Balancing even more informative then the fact that Michael went to check the information of the website. After all in the many quakes I've felt, I've always gone to the USGS Website [usgs.gov] once during and a number of times afterwards to find out both the epicenter (One was too damn close) and the magnitude. And in two cases the website was updating the start and end of the quake while I was reloading.
It's actually nice to see a government agency attempting to save money by implimenting an open source solution rather then going out and plopping down 10K in our tax dollars rashly. Hell I wish ALL [sacbee.com] Public [bayarea.com] Agencies [bayarea.com] did that.
sorry about old links :-)>