Re: Metcalfes "imminent death of the internet" prediction

[Michael Shields <[e-mail]>]

At 1996-07-25 05:56 +0000, Matthew James Marnell wrote:
>:>So what happened to the "Olympics gonna kill the net" claim? do we now
>:>see some kind of retraction?
>
>I don't know.  I've been trying to get through to the
>www.atlanta.olympic.org that IBM has been advertising in their
>Spinal Tap commercials.  While I can connect fine 50% of the
>time, the sales.atlanta.olympic.org machine seems to keep falling
>over (So badly, that even though the one page I was accessing
>said that there were still tickets available to certain events,
>but after 50 timeout, connection refused's, and incomplete pages,
>or otherwise eroneous pages, when I finally got to the order page,
>the tickets were already gone (when I finally called the number
>(which took me 15 minutes to find with the crappy responses I
>got from their servers)).  All in all, either the connection was
>bad or the servers are undertuned.  Either way, the net seems to
>be performing better than it was as little as 2 weeks ago.

From press coverage (today's Washington Post, for example), it looks like
this is poor tuning by IBM rather than collapse of the Internet.  They've
apparently had problems even with the kiosks in the Olympic Village, and it
would be hard to pin those on failures in any network other than maybe
Advantis.

altanta.olympic.org may be down, but it's not pulling backbones down with it.

--
Shields, CrossLink.