CNN is having their ballyhooed YouTube debate.
I got home and thought I’d watch it on their Web site.
I tried their live feed but that wasn’t loading. Kind of expected. Too many people trying to hit their servers simultaneously. But CNN was kind enough to upload the video of each question and answer so you could watch it on a 10 or 15 minute delay. That is, they have people converting the video to FLV’s on the fly so that you can check things out on-demand.
This is a good thought going into things but lessons learned. The site has crashed. What’s going on is that since they’re uploading new video clips every 10-15 minutes, the online audience is sending in requests to view that content and they’re getting people frantically reloading their browsers and clicking about to watch/see/hear each and every question.
That makes for so many people hitting their servers simultaneously that the servers finally said, F%&* it, we can’t keep up. Now they’re offline.
Multiply hundreds of thousands of interested vieweres clicking and clicking and clicking and you have millions and millions of simultaneous requests bringing everything down.
Score one for demonstrating that there’s a thirst for this content. Subtract two for the strategy to deliver it. Will be interesting to see what the commentary is on it in the morning.
But kudos to the sysadmins who are sweating bullets right now. We’re with you on this.
