Deals.Woot

Ouch. So that's what happened. Sorry you had to get up so early.

@zontor: I wish RSS was the only issue we had today. We have quite a bit of experience scaling out this type of traffic. To put it in perspective our http://api.woot.com/1/sales/current.rss feed is hit over a billion times on Woot-off days.

On Deals.Woot we cache RSS feeds for 30 seconds. In this case the RSS request was actually only a quarter of it. After the client downloaded the RSS feed it followed a link to the deal's detail page on Deals.Woot where it scraped the HTML for the "I want one" button and followed that link over to Moofi.Woot.

All that, 10 times per second, times several thousand of these clients distributed throughout the country... you get the idea.

@shawnmiller:

Nice. I wish I could play with that kind of volume - it would be a great learning experience.

The volumes I worry about are on a much smaller scale and impact an Avaya switch...

@shawnmiller: Now that things have calmed down, and you've had a chance to kick back and have a beer (or soda, or whatever your drink of choice is), I'm curious about a couple of things.

How long did it take you (or the team) to identify the problem, and then to identify the specific minion causing it? Do we know the minion (no, I don't expect you to tell us who, I'm asking if it's someone who was active here on Deals already)? I expect you've now got things in place to prevent this. Is it more like traffic shaping, or something else?

Boy, I'm glad this didn't happen on a weekend (and I'm sure you are too).

@dosquatch: You're right, that does look like an EKG. Where's the defibrillator when you need one?

I want to know what sort of retribution was made against the mindless minion.
Tortured by Screaming Monkeys perhaps? Or maybe you sent the Roombas after him?

@lavikinga: Hmmm, that would explain why they haven't been showing up as deals recently... and the recent string of inane, angry questioners on AtC... OMG, D.W IS BUILDING THE DALEK ARMY!!!!

Where's the Doctor?!?

@lavikinga: haha nice

@shawnmiller: Forgive me if I sound overly suspicious, but is there any likelihood this was actually an intentional attack? I'm pretty ignorant on tech stuff, but it seems as if someone bright enough to write his original little RSS software should have been bright enough to foresee potential problems. And who has several thousand friends? Or was it just a case of "bright but clueless" instead?

@zontor: Hahaha awesome. I surplussed an Avaya switch last week. My boss scoffed at me when I brought it into the office.

@josefresno: Thank you for your prompt reply (and forgive me for losing the entire note-stream for several hours).

I used to have a job in which it was useful for survival to be on a first-name basis with the "hazardous-device disposal technicians," aka bomb-squad guys; suspicion occasionally rises up in me when it needn't.