Aussie film archives launch ... and then crash

The launch of Australian Screen today was met with an unfortunate fate: by 10am the site had crashed.

The new site, which serves excerpts of Australian film and television archives crashed once users -- primarily teachers and students -- began accessing the new service this morning.

Thomas Ashelford, Australian Screen's technical director told ZDNet Australia that its Linux servers "went into meltdown".

"We're organising additional hardware now," he said.

Ashelford could not say at the time of the interview how many requests the site received for it to cause its servers to meltdown.

The team spent two and half years on the project, primarily developing its custom-built content management system which is developed on a Jenga Web Applications framework, said Ashelford.

The AU$2.4 million project is a shared initiative between the federal government and the Australian Film Commission.

When the site is restored it can be accessed at: http://australianscreen.com.au.

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Talkback 9 comments

    Linux went down John -- 18/07/07

    no way it couldn't be a linux issue, must be Microsoft's fault, it always is...

    Orrrrr, they could have underestimated demand? James Purser -- 19/07/07 (in reply to #320083002)

    Oh you mean someone didn't scope requirements properly?

    News flash, if you don't give a site enough hardware, its going to go down, doesn't matter whether its MS or Linux or OSX or [INSERT OS YOU FANBOY HERE]

    Or demand was estimated ok Anonymous -- 19/07/07 (in reply to #320083031)

    It was just during the implementation process, the technical people involved quite likely raised concerns about the hardware being insufficient to cope and were largely ignored because budgets were overrun and the easiest way to cut costs is to reduce the amount of kit.

    sounds like a Linux Bigot to me John -- 19/07/07 (in reply to #320083031)

    oh yeah that's right you are aren't you....

    Way to have an intelligent debate James Purser -- 19/07/07 (in reply to #320083044)

    Looks like we're in the realm of the kindergarten. In keeping with the tone here's my contribution.

    "ner ner, I know you are but what am I?"

    You are right John -- 19/07/07 (in reply to #320083074)

    obviously the archtiects of the solutions didn't do any propoer testing, audience uptake expectancy and therefore didn't scale the system up or out to accomodate the load.

    The robustness of the platform to support the load is the second issue, going very slow and reshaping traffic may have helped but crashing is not acceptable. Maybe they didn't build the robustness into the platform nor the design, or maybe the robustness just doesn't exist

    okay a common thread John -- 19/07/07 (in reply to #320083074)

    ZDnet had an article about another open source site biting the dust recently also about its inability to handle a peak load and crashing.
    Are you trying to tell me you are ready to design for the enterprise?

    Date: Thu, 19 Jul 2007 06:29:19 GMT

    Server: Apache/1.3.27 (Unix) (Red-Hat/Linux) PHP/4.4.2 mod_perl/1.29

    Location: http://www.jetstar.com/

    Connection: close

    Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1

    Correction Scott -- 19/07/07

    It isn't the Jenga Web Application framework, it is Django, see http://www.djangoproject.com for more details.

    This can be confirmed on Thomas' own blog posting here: http://woodandwire.org/2007/06/18/australianscreen-ready-for-launch/

    typical... Anonymous -- 19/07/07

    i could just imagine this happening...

    90% of the budget was probably spent on "soft skills development" - we dont need no hardware!! just how to smile like a dumb blonde/brunette sales gal!

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