Yeah!!

-- ExCop (yinadral@juno.com), December 29, 1999

Answers

For several minutes there I was running in the wind with nowhere to go.It feels good to be back home.

-- LuckyDog (Noplace@likehome.com), December 29, 1999.

8:01 pst and I'm still getting Phil's message only now it's a bit more ominous.

"This computer is ancient (167 MHz processors) and shared by thousands of publishers. The forum you've requested is a Y2K discussion forum that consumes 95% of the server's resources during standard times. Sorry to deny access to this forum right before the big day (actually at MIT we don't really care about Y2K; we are more terrified when the semester starts up on February 1), but it is the only way to preserve services for the other users.

Fundamentally the problem is that Y2K users don't believe in our Oracle database and tape backups. They are using desktop robots to try to transfer the 300,000+ messages in this forum down to their local machines, one thread at a time. This results in my server getting hundreds of requests per second, each of which requires several Oracle queries. The bottom line demand is more than 1000 Oracle queries per second on a computer that is probably slower than what you have on your desktop. I tried turning the Y2K forums on again after a hiatus but found that users immediately turned their robots on as well.

As the author of http://photo.net/wtr/thebook/ I'm a bit humiliated that my service didn't hold up. On the other hand, it was built to support human beings talking to each other. The average human can't read 10 threads per second! So it isn't surprising that multiple simultaneous robots could overwhelm this machine.

If you want the forum turned back on, send me a Quad Pentium from www.penguincomputing.com! Or a 10-year-old's Athlon 700 game machine! It is sad that small children have faster computers than MIT but that's life...

Sorry,

Philip just before Y2K"

Mike

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-- Mike Taylor (mtdesign3@aol.com), December 29, 1999.