Hi!
Just a quick note -- we're experiencing some fun
load spikes due to
heavy net usage of people searching for or talking about Michael
Jackson's reported death or near-death.
tech blog doesn't seem to get much updates.
The problem is quite simple, lots of people (like, million pageviews
on an article in an hour) caused a cache stampede (all pageviews
between invalidation and re-rendering needed parsing), and as MJ
article is quite cite-heavy (and cite problems were outlined in
http://article.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical/41547
;) the reparsing was very very painful on our application cluster -
all apache children eventually ended up doing lots of parsing work and
consuming connection slots to pretty much everything :)
Cheers,
Domas