14. October 2006

Protv, tibet and traffic

vinatoare de oameni“A video footage by a Romanian cameraman showing Chinese troops firing on fleeing unarmed Tibetans near the Nepal-Tibet border belies China’s claim that the soldiers fired in “self defense”. Sergiu Matei, a Romanian cameraman who was on his first climbing trip to Cho Oyu, the world’s sixth highest mountain located on the Nepal-Tibet border, witnessed Chinese troops firing on unarmed Tibetans trying to escape into Nepal from China-controlled territory Sep 30, resulting in the death of a young nun and triggering international furore. Matei, who returned to Bucharest Thursday, posted the video footage on the website www.protv.ro, clearly showing that the fleeing Tibetans had their backs to the soldiers, were unarmed, and offered no resistance. The nun who died, Kelsang Namtso, appears to have been shot in the back.”

I won’t comment on the news issue. Instead i will focus on the technical challenge that was ahead of us ( yes i’m the Linux sysadmin of ProTV ). Since the news posted has generated an interest world wide we expected huge traffic. At the time of this we have a 250 Mbps constant traffic and we expect that this situation to continue for at least another day or two. Our normal web traffic is around 40 Mbps so we had to split the load between servers. Here are some graphics:

  • Medium traffic measured at the outgoing interface.

[medium traffic 1](/images/protv_tibet_6.webpmedium traffic 1")

  • Evolution of the traffic in time:

[Traffic evolution](/images/traffic_ev.webpTraffic evolution")

This kind of web traffic is what is called “slash dot effect”. What i’m proud of is that on all the servers up we have TFM/GNU Linux and they worked very well under this kind of stress condition Of course behind the machines there are are people that make things possible. Most of the time you don’t even know their names and they like to stay behind the stage lights. But for this particular case i will reveal their names:

ProTV technical team:

  • Adrian Tranca
  • Catalin Pop
  • Mihai Moldovanu ( me )
  • Gabi Lisca

The web team who created and edited the content for the site was coordinated by Robert Berza. Technical facts:

  • People that watched the video footage: more than 110.000 in the first 10 hours.
  • More than 2100 Gb of data served in 10 hours
  • traffic.ro jumped from place 72 to place 19
  • All the servers are running TFM/GNU Linux 3.0. Apache 2.2.3 / lighttpd .

It is sad that in the 21’th century unarmed people are shot down like animals. Sincere condoleances to the Tibetan people for their loss.

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