How Telcos and ISPs Are Preparing For a Pandemic

alphadogg writes "Network operators and IT professionals already worried about how hurricanes and financial meltdowns will impact their work lives can add another potential catastrophe to their list of concerns: a global pandemic. During a panel sponsored by the FCC in Washington, D.C. this week, representatives from telecom carriers and ISPs discussed what steps they've been taking to prepare for the mass outbreak of a disease such as influenza, and also described the needs and challenges they would have to meet to keep communications up and running during a major global crisis. The most important tool at ISPs' disposal during a serious pandemic, panelists agreed, was that of network and bandwidth management controls."

Wait

[PunkOfLinux]

How, exactly, does a global pandemic affect a network? Why would they need network management tools in case of such an event?

Re:Wait

[dapyx]

I remember that a few hours after the attack, CNN had a plain-text main page.

That's the only solution in case of disaster: currently, the CNN main page has 18181 bytes and a further 689153 bytes of inline elements (images ,js, css, etc).

Re:Wait

[ultranova]

When hits per second exceeds some specific number, stop serving so many ads and images. Don't serve video. Serve text (news stories) and small images only. Switch to static HTML pages for the front page and major stories.

Or simply have two servers. One serves text (HTML and CSS), the other images, video and other fluff. That way the readers can read the stories, and the images load if they will. You could even share the image server between several newssites; they'll be the same content anyway. And you'd want your router to give absolute preference to the packets from the text server, so the images and videos can't clog the pipe.

And all the pages should be static HTML anyway, with the content management system simply automatically re-generating them as needed. Updates in a newssite happen relatively rarely compared to views, so it makes sense to optimize for the latter.

Coming to think of it... It would probably require server tweaking, but since we're talking about very small text files, it might be possible to keep the whole front page and every story in it memory mapped. Then you'd simply send them to the socket directly from there, without needing to open the file.