01.04
So today amid the rain and the wind the Sacramento Bee, tired of their own traffic page, linked to Sactraffic.org directly off their homepage. I was so proud… for about 5 minutes.
It didn’t last long. My little Via C3 powered server I run on my little tiny DSL line almost immediately melted down. Interestingly it wasn’t the server load, as Sactraffic is all client-based code, and it wasn’t the bandwidth as my 1.5mbps/384kbps DSL line never peaked past 70% (though that in itself is well into “yellow-light” area)… it was the sheer number of requests and the rate they came in at that did the server in.
Suddenly there was a whole lot of:
[error] (35)Resource temporarily unavailable: fork: Unable to fork new process
in the logs. I was SacBee-dotted.
My home server was just not configured for that kind of traffic. I did some quick Googling and as I suspected the default kernel settings in OpenBSD are intentionally conservative (secure by default). I made a quick call, while I’m sure I could have tweaked it and gotten things humming, it would still be a ancient homebuilt server on a home DSL line.
Punt.
It took a bit for the firehose to turn off and things to calm down. What’s interesting is that due (I assume) to the massive number of incidents the CHP was experiencing the CHP XML feed that powers Sactraffic was also experiencing problems so at least I wasn’t alone 
.
