choking - or how we learned to stop worrying and love DSL

roland.wells — Mon, 05 Mar 2007 15:35:54 -0600

So today, the inevitable finally happened...we completely, totally ran out of bandwidth. Thank you everyone for contributing to this amazing feat!

The problem: Mr. Sundar Raman did a great interview with Cory Doctorow on his show Open Views. Cory subsequently posted on his blog a direct link to the archived interview on our server. In less than 12 hours, over 1000 people downloaded (or attempted to download) the 60mb .mp3 file...a total of about 60 gigs worth of attempted bandwidth usage. Needless to say, our 2mb DSL connection was not able to keep up; downloads slowed to a crawl, the website took an hour to load, and our live stream was choked out of existence. It was the best possible failure we could hope for: not that the fragile clump of boxes and wire that we call the server/transmitter room (pics below!) finally caught on fire, but that we just couldn't keep up with the demand...

Temporary Solution: Once we realized this was happening, we took the file down from our main server and put up a link to a mirror copy at a temporary location, and another link to the file on archive.org. This will get us through the night...

The light at the end of the tunnel: LISCO (our "Local Internet Service Company") generously provides us with a 2mb DSL connection at no cost, later this spring they will switch us over to their new Fiber project, upgrading our connection to 1000Mbps, thats right not a typo, 1000Mbps. That should go a long way to helping increase our capacity for streaming and downloading. read more »

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choking - or how we learned to stop worrying and love DSL