While You Were Sleeping
We posted the new AllPeers screenshots last Thursday, but apparently it took a few days for them to percolate through the blogosphere. As it happens, I set off on Monday for a week of vacationing in London, and left my laptop at home under the assumption that “nothing happens in the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day.” I’ve therefore been cut off from the web world for the past few days, an experience which is both liberating and slightly disconcerting for an internet junkie like myself. As a result, I was totally oblivious to the fact that people appear to be interested, after all, in the idea of adding peer-to-peer capabilities to Firefox.
This changed yesterday when I turned my cellphone back on after Mike Leigh’s excellent new play “Two Thousand Years” at the National Theatre. Slashdot had picked up the story, a text message from Cedric informed me, and as a result our web server had been battered senseless, again. I dare say we’ll get it right this time and find a configuration capable of withstanding a sudden massive spike in visitor volume. In the meantime, apologies to anyone who tried to access the site in the past twelve hours and wasn’t able to.
Some of the comments to the screenshots post merit answers, and I’ll get to that next week when I’m back in the office. After all, there’s much more to AllPeers than peer-to-peer. I was also planning to write about Digg, the latest challenger to Slashdot’s supremacy, riffing off Alex Bosworth’s excellent analysis. Now’s that we’ve been dugg, I have a bunch more to say about this. And finally, I may even post some predictions for 2006. After all, everyone else is doing it (Blake Ross’s satirical take is particularly entertaining). Right now I’m sitting in the Institute of Directors, and the frigid weather in London has turned what should be a cosy web-enabled nook into an internet igloo. For the sake of my frozen fingers, I’ll sign off.
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Excited by this and I do realize the positives of Firefox but, minus the BitTorrent client, the question asked on the screenshots post about ‘initiating file transfer via IM’ is nevertheless a good one
Comment by RG — 12/30/2005 @ 10:04 pm
FWIW, a good friend tells me that disabling keep-alive in httpd.conf had a huge effect on how fast their server could process requests (I think they were up over 450 connections per second when they had to implement this). This may be special case that applies only if you’re running MySQL backend–MySQL was bogging more than apache at the time but the apache connections were staying alive while awaiting a response from MySQL. Now they’re averaging more like 50 connections a second max with the same user load.
Comment by heavyboots — 1/4/2006 @ 1:58 am
[…] from Mashable*Digg, the social news ranking site, has been getting a lot of coverage lately. It started with Alex Bosworth’s excellent Dynamics of Digg post, where he suggested that there are 5 types of Digg users. Richard MacManus summarized his points n… » While You Were Sleeping from Peer Pressure We posted the new AllPeers screenshots last Thursday, but apparently it took a few days for them to percolate through the blogosphere. As it happens, I set off on Monday for a week of vacationing in London, and left my laptop at home under the assumpti… [Read More] […]
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