FR24 - getting more popular

[HermanZA]

Mike and the rest of the FR24 crew,

Over the past few years FR24 has grown tremendously, in both the coverage and the user demand. As far as I can tell, all services are hosted in Sweden, on a major network provider. At times of heavy traffic, things start getting hectic on network and server level. I noticed this yesterday afternoon even with my feeders having issues to connect to the mothership.

Have you not considered using CDN networks like Akamai, or Cloud Services like Google, for the hosting of the frontend servers, thereby having a smaller impact on your systems, while the bulk of the traffic is handled by the CDN/Cloud, which may be distributed over a few nodes around the globe?

Thinking for instance, hosting in South Africa (where your local currency is stronger than ours, making it "cheap" for you), and then something on an American and Asian network, taking the traffic from the respective regions... but keeping the mothership in Sweden protected from all the www requests.

[Apologies if this has been asked somewhere else]

[SoCalBrian]

Maybe the Amazon servers would help too.

http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/

Elastic Web-Scale Computing
Amazon EC2 enables you to increase or decrease capacity within minutes, not hours or days. You can commission one, hundreds or even thousands of server instances simultaneously. Of course, because this is all controlled with web service APIs, your application can automatically scale itself up and down depending on its needs.

[peterhr]

Maybe the Amazon servers would help too.

http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/

Elastic Web-Scale Computing
Amazon EC2 enables you to increase or decrease capacity within minutes, not hours or days. You can commission one, hundreds or even thousands of server instances simultaneously. Of course, because this is all controlled with web service APIs, your application can automatically scale itself up and down depending on its needs.

Not as easy as it would seem from that - there will be a lot of data flowing between the web server and the database server - so those need to be close together and there is always a danger of overloading the back end if the front end is expanded willi-nilly. Of course the number of database servers could also be expanded - but they still have to be populated with new data as it arrives and with minimal latency between the servers. That probably means putting the whole operation into a cloud centre.

Then you get this ... http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/06...ces_destroyed/

[RAFF]

Then you get this ... http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/06...ces_destroyed/

Agreed.

Also I would imagine overload only happens in the extreme when there is a major incident, as FR24 is seen as a reliable and authoritative source. As this is hopefully rare, then changing the system significantly may not be the answer. Limiting access as at present seems a cost effective and reasonable solution.

[HermanZA]

With the recent activity, and we all can agree that FR is deemed and authoritive and independent source, I think it has become obvious that some forward planning needs to be done in terms of capacity and capability to handle the super peak periods. One would not want to see the credibility of FR be compromised in times of high traffic during these peak periods. As with all such things, it will incur a lot of work and expenses, but at the end of the day, it will strengthen FR's position as the leader in independent and reliable aircraft tracking, always on, always working, always reliable.
I would dare to say, that will please both the users, feeders and management of FR24.
But again, it would be interesting to us if some of the FR guys chime in and share their thoughts as to the volumes and demands the system faced the past few days.

[HermanZA]

From the FR24 Facebook page:
13 hours ago
As many of you have noticed Flightradar24 has been very slow last days. Sometimes a timeout message shows up as there are too many visitors waiting to be served by Flightradar24 web servers.

Our servers have capacity to handle about 5-10 times the normal visitor numbers. Because of the very extensive media coverage (20,000+ articles according to Google News + most TV channels) after the tragic MH17 crash we have received up to about 50 times normal traffic which our servers have not been able to handle.

To increase server capacity we have turned off the global playback feature as this feature generates most server load. Playback and flight history for individual flights is still available on http://www.flightradar24.com/data/

Global playback will be turned on as soon as capacity allows it to be turned on. Also within 3-5 days we will release an updated version of Flightradar24 with several new features including faster and better global playback.

In order to avoid such problems in the future we have to decided to scale up capacity to be able to handle up to about 50-100 times more visitors than we do normally. This will take about 1-2 months to get in place.

We are really sorry for not being able to provide a stable service and we will also make sure that premium members will be compensated for the service disruption. More information about this soon.

Comment: "Up to 50 times normal traffic" - just shows how FR24 is trusted as THE independant source of flight tracking information.

[SoCalBrian]

Nice to see FR24 add more bandwidth today.


"We more than tripled our Internet bandwidth this morning. Later this week more servers will be connected."

https://twitter.com/flightradar24/status/496168852355809281

[Birdie]

Nice to see FR24 add more bandwidth today.


"We more than tripled our Internet bandwidth this morning. Later this week more servers will be connected."
https://twitter.com/flightradar24/st...68852355809281

Congratulations to FlightRadar24 for treating their Feeders well ( unlike another competitor's site ).

The tracking of MH 370 & MH 17 - did plenty of good publicity for this site. It was mentioned many times by many news Media all over the world.

It was also mentioned in Singapore Parliament during the question & answer of SQ 351 following behind MH 17 in Ukraine.

Keep up the good work - don't forget to reward Feeders when Flightradar24 got listed in the Stockholm Stock Exchange and New York Stock Exchange. We should be awarded some shares. LOL !

[Mike]

Yes we have received quite a lot of media coverage the last month. First German soccer team flying home, later MH17 and finally Ukraine, Syrian, Iraqi and North Korean airspace issues. We had some server issues as more or less everything that could get overloaded was overloaded. We have been working hard during our vacation times to upgrade our capacity. Our bandwidth was upgraded from 3 GBit/s to 10 GBit/s, we have twice as many web servers, we have upgraded our database, we have made several software upgrades and and we are now launching a separate feeder server. Next step will be a separate server for premium users. I hope that all changes together will make it possible to handle about 4-8 times more traffic compared to what we managed in July, and in case we get even more traffic premium users will be prioritized.

[mbudden]

Yes we have received quite a lot of media coverage the last month. First German soccer team flying home, later MH17 and finally Ukraine, Syrian, Iraqi and North Korean airspace issues. We had some server issues as more or less everything that could get overloaded was overloaded. We have been working hard during our vacation times to upgrade our capacity. Our bandwidth was upgraded from 3 GBit/s to 10 GBit/s, we have twice as many web servers, we have upgraded our database, we have made several software upgrades and and we are now launching a separate feeder server. Next step will be a separate server for premium users. I hope that all changes together will make it possible to handle about 4-8 times more traffic compared to what we managed in July, and in case we get even more traffic premium users will be prioritized.

Sounds like things have been massively busy back at the HQ eh? Best wishes.

[mbudden]

HA HA .. quite funny statement. No they do not treat all feeders well.

I've not had anything but a positive experience so far.
Support has emailed me promptly when I needed assistance and Mike seems very active on the forum.

Not sure what you mean by they don't treat us well.