Hacker News Reader

Comment by brk | Hacker News Reader

Disappointedly lacking on details.

Why did page load time go up during the quake? Was there a fiber fault that took a few seconds to be routed around? Did the vibrations cause HDDs to temporarily suspend?

This could have some interesting data behind it, but as it is the article doesn't even have conclusive proof that the earthquake did cause this outage.

View on HN

As far as the reason, you'd have to ask who works on AWS. For obvious reasons, we don't have direct access to the Amazon datacenter.

As far as conclusive proof is concerned, yes, we can't guarantee there wasn't a gravitational singularity that affected response time, but it's very likely that this was the case.

Yeah, latency is most likely due to the vibrations affecting the various rack components, as commented here. Actually, earthquake-proofing datacenters is a big business in places like the West-Coast USA and Japan: http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2007/07/17/earth...

I remember watching a video about how vibrations can have a negative impact on hard drive latency (Video is at the bottom.):

http://blogs.oracle.com/brendan/entry/unusual_disk_latency

So, "AWS happened to it," then?

"Over here at SeatGeek, we were excitedly discussing the tremor when Mike, our trusty sysadmin, realized that our Amazon AWS servers were all in Virginia, right near the epicenter. Did it impact the service at all?"

I was reflecting on my parent's comment that the actual reasons were opaque due to SG's use of AWS.

Presumably the earthquake caused a spike in social network usage, microblogging of various popular types, and reload-mashing on cnn.com and similar. If any of those is hosted on AWS then they might steal some cycles from other AWS users.

Purely anecdotal, but here in downtown DC, cell networks were fine during and immediately after the quake, but were completely overwhelmed 5-10 minutes later by everyone pulling out their phone at once.

Another thing that comes to mind is that some computers have accelerometers in them that stop the harddisks if the machine experiences sudden acceleration. If AWS has the same system in place, that might affect their servers' responsiveness.

Well, I have no idea what actually happened down there, but the timing would be a pretty incredible coincidence.

"Earthquakes make Web Servers sad". Dude. What the FUCK?

Yeah dude! These things happen.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com