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Network Traffic Problems on October 15, 2007
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Description of Problem.
On Monday, October 15, 2007, beginning at about 7:45 PM MST, the EZ-NetTools web servers were barraged by an enormous influx of traffic. As a result, for about two hours, most web sites serviced by EZ-NetTools could not be displayed. While the situation was better later in the day, the response times were longer than normal. The email services were NOT affected.
Cause of the Problem.
All of this traffic was directed at one EZ-NetTools customer, www.impactjackets.com. The traffic came from two sources. First, this customer’s products were featured in a CNN news story, resulting in a lot of interest in their products. The story was picked up by other national channels later in the week and into the next week. However, by that time changes had been made to our system to handle the load. Second, there was evidence of a denial of service attack targeted at this same account at the same time.
Solution to the problem.
As soon as we understood the nature of the problem we arranged for a larger network connection since this was the primary choking point. Once this was arranged, people where able to view web pages, although slower than normal throughout Monday. With some additional changes we made late Monday afternoon and evening, the response time returned to normal on Tuesday.
While this flood of traffic was hitting our servers, we were able to observe how our servers handled a much larger load than we had ever experienced before. We observed other potential bottle necks that were not usually noticeable under normal conditions. As a result we made some configuration changes that not only removed those potential bottle necks when stressed, but generally made the system run faster under normal loads. The improvement in response time has been apparent when working in EZ-PageBuilder or working with the EZ-Catalog.
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