Mars lander (Re: How to achieve application reliability)

Mon Dec 6 07:15:58 UTC 1999

> Yes, it was very impressive.  I was hoping they would be successfull, because
> in a few weeks the next event will also require some interesting web site
> hosting.  If it had worked, then the people who follow could just copy it.
> Even without a feed to push, the sites were unresponsive for parts of the
> day.
> 
> http://www.newsbytes.com/pubNews/99/140268.html
> 
> I'm very concerned we still haven't proven we know how to handle big event
> sites on the Internet.  

performance of most of the mirrored sites of mars.jpl.nasa.gov, as
well as:

www.marspolarlander.com
www.livefrommars.com
www.planetary.org
a few others i can't remember now

was really, really bad most of the day.  pulling up 300kb/s or even
28.8kb/s video from broadcast.com was horrible with several minutes
time to "sync" with nearly still control room video.

(i'm blaming sites as opposed to network because pings and traceroutes
really didn't look bad at all from where i was sitting)

i had really expected they prepared for this in a big way.  if nasa
had gotten contact the first time and actually had video, stills, and
audio to distribute, i personally believe it would have all melted
down.

i don't think it was so much network problems as
server/web/application problems.  pages came up blank many times,
servers said "too may users", etc.

i think we haven't proven we know how to handle  server/os/application
development on the net as opposed to networks that scale.

-brett