If a website encounters an influx of unexpected traffic for multiple weeks causing it to crash, how do they fix this and how long would it normally take? Also, how could it still not function during lower traffic times?
In: Technology
When a page is being loaded up there’s a worker (thread) on your computer that makes a (tcp) connection and sends a request for the page. On the internet somewhere there’s another computer that has the page and it also assigns a worker (thread) just for you. This is a point of choking while milions can access a single site, that computer gets overloaded creating miliins of programs (one per client) to handle them. This is mitigated by having multiple computers in the same room or building and distributing the clients.
Then there’s the information overload, sometimes the page isn’t as simple and it needs to ask for some detail from some book (database). If too many people in the room fight over the single book that holds the data then it also locks up and you get weird traffic jam effects.
Then there’s what’s called a dns overload. When you first type in a name in your browser your computer has to check that name against an address to find it’s computer destination that is the country/town where the server is. It used to happen when too many people in an area went to the same “phone book” to search for an ip/adress it would lock that up and your computer couldn’t load a page it hasn’t seen before.
Hope this clears it up, there are even more limits and scenarios around traffic routing, but in all cases you can imagine it as car traffic jams in cities or highway intersections.
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