Election night and Canadian news sites feel the pinch
Posted by Jesse Rodgers on January 23, 2006 at 10:36 PM
This is slightly OT for this blog but I figure I will mention this observation anyway. At 10:20pm on election night I have looked at four Canadian news sites and to my surprise only two are running smoothly, The Toronto Star and the National Post.CBC was down at the time of this posting and the Globe and Mail is running as slow as ever… but it works.
The two that are up use a Flash like set up for what appears to be real-time updates of results. It is really nice to see actually and by the fact the sites are all acting a bit slower than normal suggests that Canadians are using these sites (maybe on wireless connections will they watch CSI—and its halarious blogging feature tonight, tv internet… goodness).
To bring this back on topic… As we look at how to present news to the UW community its fun to have a look how the ‘big news’ deals with information. Also interesting to see which technology they use and how traffic can slow that stuff down. Now back to CSI and its funny representation of blogs. I wonder how many blog posts will make fun of the amount of times they mention ‘blog’ in CSI—blogdays.com hahah? The CBC site is back up too. Oh look, no Flash based charts? Sheesh.
Moral of the story: Even media sites with their large dedicated web teams and budgets can’t deal with high load—I would love to know what the load was however.