Nov 24 2008
Too Much Interest in new EU Digital Library
The EU launched a new digital library called Europeana last Thursday. The purpose of this digital library is to contain documents that are of cultural significance to the citizens of the EU. Initially, the digital library contains over 2 million items, but this is expected to grow rapidly.
The website was designed to handle initial traffic of 5 million visitors per hour. However, after its launch the website was receiving over 10 million visitors per hour! This naturally had serious consequences on the performance of the website, and several hours later the number of visitors had not subsided. Therefore, the website has gone offline until it can cope with this larger number of visitors.
I am sure that the website creators are delighted with the level of interest in their website, but I wonder how they got their estimates so wrong. Perhaps there is no way to reliably estimate how many visitors a new website will receive. I also wonder what steps they could have taken to dynamically cope with such large numbers of visitors.
More details about this story can be read in New EU online library crashes under weight of interest.
November 25th, 2008 at 10:30
“I also wonder what steps they could have taken to dynamically cope with such large numbers of visitors.”
It’s called Cloud Computing and Elastic Compute Cloud (http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/).
…”designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers”…
November 25th, 2008 at 12:32
I guessed that somebody would suggest that ;)
November 25th, 2008 at 14:44
I’m sure that was the reason you asked