Heavy traffic overloads Inq7.net

Abe Olandres Editor-in-chief July 8, 2005 · 2 min read

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Starting early today, the website of Inq7.net has been suffering from heavy traffic and has resorted to a low-graphics version of their website. This is no surprise considering the recent issues plaguing the nation concerning the Gloriagate fiasco.

I did some quick research of my own on how Inq7.net is set up. So far, what is widely known is that their site is hosted by Bitstop (video streams are coming from Bitstop, no doubt.). I check their DNS servers and gave me 3 IPs, the primary DNS from a US (Mountain View, California but the IP is registered to Inq7.net) and the other two is Philippine based, owned by PLDT and Eastern Telecoms.

I have no idea how many servers are clustered to deliver content but I heard that they were not using any database servers for content delivery because of the risks it entails. With running a DB, when something crashes it or it chokes, content delivery is halted on all levels. By using flat files, they can still seperate the archives from the recent news and be able to serve them up quite efficiently. They’ll only have to worry about the webserver (they run Apache/1.3.31 with PHP/4.3.8) instead of both. These server/s host 5 sites — Inq7.net, Inq7.com, Inqseven.com, Inquirer.net and Inq7money.net.

With over 1 million unique visitors and 30 million web pages served a month, I am sure they have made some sort of server clustering or load balancing to be able to opmitize their site.

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Abe Olandres

Editor-in-chief

Abe is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of YugaTech with over 20 years of experience in the technology industry. He is one of the pioneers of blogging in the country and is considered by many as the Father of Tech Blogging in the Philippines.

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26 Comments

file search · 16 years ago

Brilliant information with regard to upload files for getting myself personally begin. I most certainly will keep this specific website link and revisit it.

vern · 21 years ago

There is no reason not to use databases, even for reasons you’ve listed. There are many ways to fit a need (databases w/ cached content). My own opinion is that their web development team still does not have the training required to run a site of that magnitude. I recently worked for a college and developed a CMS to manage our content. It took well over a year to develop and is still in development and is far from complete, but the framework is there and it works. If their web development team does have the skills required to do a major overhaul, I suspect conflict between the powers that be and IT. Old school management doesn’t want to invest into anything unless it’s benefits slap them on the face.

kai · 21 years ago

the new inq express page is so refreshingly different from the old version.

maybe they should cut out on those ads that clutter the page. nakakahilo maghanap ng link sa lumang site.

the revamped site is simpler and so much easier to navigate. :)

ralphot · 21 years ago

or they can use a localized CMS that would allow them to generate the flat files offline, then just upload the necessary files to the server.

we use the same here at work. :D

hoop · 21 years ago

kailangan ata ng additional mirrored host… meron kayang nag po-provide ng on-demand na mirror? magandang racket yon ah… total minsan minsan lang naman nagkakamalaking issue so no point in having excess servers around… hehehe

:-)

Abe Olandres Editor-in-chief · 21 years ago

I guess that their Apache connections have maxed out. There is a limitation on the maximum number of users that can be connected to the server all at the same time.

Fleeb · 21 years ago

What I wanted is that the files contain only the content. The HTML would be in separate file, which will call the flat files so that there would be less server resources to use everytime you republish (you would only republish the HTML). I haven’t attempted to try javascript to do that (I am not sure if js is capable of doing that, maybe some workarounds).

Kates · 21 years ago

Ahh.. OO nga no? Di ko naisip yun ah. Bakit nga ba ang bagal ng talaga ng INQ7?

Abe Olandres Editor-in-chief · 21 years ago

Hoop is right. May CMS pa rin sila for the editors to use to submit the articles but once it is published, it’s already flat file.

hoop · 21 years ago

@fleeb

yan ata gamit sa blogger, save the posts sa db then user manually publishes the html file.

napapaisip tuloy ako, magandang idea yan para ma reduce yung server load at ma speed up yung access time.. :-)

retzwerx · 21 years ago

good idea, kaso baka nagtitipid? kaya flatfile na lang, hehe

Fleeb · 21 years ago

They can still use DBs to store info, generate a flat file out of those contained in the DB, that way when something happens to the DB there will still be flat files. When something will happen to the files, then there will still be a DB where the files can be regenerated. Redundancy… :D

Kates · 21 years ago

Then they must have paid so much for their IT guys to transfer back and forth all those flat files. I didn’t know they can’t afford to buy an Oracle. Maybe the Oracle sales team should exert more effort to convince this mammoth media company to adapt to newer technology.

How many visits pinoyblog.com daily? If pinoyblog can serve even a tenth of what they had and considering the number of persons and monetary capability of pinoyblog’s team as compared to INQ7’s then yuga’s team thrash them. BTW, I noticed a slowdown on pinoyblog too. Calling yuga.