12/8/2011 - Slow Site due to the Virginia Tech shootings

[blantonl]

These are the top-10 feed events

| Jasper and Newton County Public Safety   |              9908 | 2011-05-22 21:58:33  | 
| Kent County Police and Fire              |              9027 | 2011-07-07 22:37:18  | 
| New River Valley Public Safety           |              7673 | 2011-12-08 14:06:30  | 
| Christian County Weather Spotter Network |              4703 | 2010-10-24 14:34:22  | 
| Boulder County Sheriff and Fire          |              3736 | 2010-09-06 18:49:49  | 
| Marion County MECA Fire and Rescue       |              3433 | 2011-08-13 21:32:35  | 
| Phoenix East Valley Law Enforcement      |              3328 | 2011-01-05 15:54:32  | 
| Rolla Central Police, Fire, EMS          |              3285 | 2011-05-12 10:56:16  | 
| San Mateo County Fire and CAL FIRE       |              3178 | 2010-09-09 23:31:15  | 
| Kennedy Space Center Communications      |              3019 | 2011-02-24 15:56:45  | 
+------------------------------------------+-------------------+----------------------+

 

[jasonpeoria911]

Obviously the more popular & publicity RR live feeds get, the more listeners current events will get now. I'm curious just how high the VA Tech listeners would have reached? 20,000-30,000 or higher maybe?

Lindsay, is it possible to get relay feeds setup for future bigger events when a mass influx of visitors to the sight prevents connection to the main feed?

Jason

 

[blantonl]

Obviously the more popular & publicity RR live feeds get, the more listeners current events will get now. I'm curious just how high the VA Tech listeners would have reached? 20,000-30,000 or higher maybe?

Lindsay, is it possible to get relay feeds setup for future bigger events when a mass influx of visitors to the sight prevents connection to the main feed?

Jason

Jason, the audio servers had no problem whatsoever - we are scaled on the audio server side to support well over 75K listeners without provisioning new resources.

The issue was the mass influx of people to the site caused the Web servers to slow under the load. We resolved that by adding more Web servers and database replicas.

Therefore, no one was really "prevented" from listening to the feed - it might have take the site more time to load and some folks might have had to try a couple times, but almost every one who wanted to listen to the feed had an opportunity to do so.

Remember, we've supported events with far more listeners - for instance the midwest Tornados saw us see total listener counts well into the 30K's...

 

[blantonl]

Additionally, in reviewing traffic statistics from the event, we had over 50,000 unique people listen to the feed during the afternoon. Remember, a lot of listeners during these types of events come and go because there was either little to no relevant traffic, or they don't understand what they are hearing.

 

[jasonpeoria911]

Yah Lindsay, I thought RR was able to handle a lot more listeners but numerous reports on twitter said they couldn't connect to the feed and I couldn't as well from my Droid X for an hour and then I gave up. The other feeds connected fine during that time.

I tried connecting with the Scanner Radio app as well as downloading the winamp file. The Scanner Radio app said unable to connect and the winamp option said "error in download or playlist" something like that. I also tried using the web player but the page kept giving a socket error after a few minutes of loading.

Not sure if that's how it's suppose to be when you throttle things down or whatever but maybe something that needs looked at if this is not normal.

Jason

 

[sparkdawg2002]

The feed failed to load for me, but then I saw the number of listeners and figured that is what it was.

Same for me, could not connect to the feed. It was about 6,100+ listeners when I was trying to connect. I simply reloaded every 45 seconds or so and after a few minutes, I was able to connect to the feed. I figured the VT incident was the cause.

 

[jasonpeoria911]

Ahh yah, I was on my Droid at work and could only try hitting the reconnect button every 5 minutes or so. I probably would of been able to get in if I constantly tried connecting. Probably just to many people trying to connect at the same time.

Jason

 

[reedeb]

This is why I don't usually jump on the audio section when I hear of something like this going down. I try to keep it off so others closer and in more need then I can listen in.