All told, there are about fourteen pages per issue. Of course, the article pages are really big and the main home page is tiny, but there's still just about fourteen pages. Of those fourteen pages, only the news page changes daily. Everything else changes when the issue itself is updated, which is monthly.

We also built a Compact Edition. This version of the publication has everything the Full Edition has, except for the articles themselves. So readers of the Compact Edition save about nine file downloads and a bunch of bytes. But, of course, they lose the ability to read the articles.

In any case, when a new subscriber signs up for the channel, nothing's already on the device and all fourteen pages (in the Full Edition) are downloaded. All at once. At one time. With no pause. In a chunk. Gobble gobble. Without taking a breath.

This is not how our Web server was trained to expect traffic. When you read one of our magazines, you retrieve a page, take a little time to read it, retrieve another page, and so on. But when you sign up for our Mobile Edition, AvantGo feeds all fourteen pages as fast as it can down to your machine.

If you do the math, it's interesting. If we have ten simultaneous online readers, we're feeding about 20 files (between pages and graphics). But if we have ten simultaneous, new mobile readers, we're feeding 140 files (seven times the load). Plus the files were bigger (we paginate our online files, we don't paginate the mobile ones). And the files were all text (online files are a mix of text and graphics).

By Tuesday afternoon, it became apparent that triage was going to be needed. We first tried reconfiguring the server to allow more simultaneous connections and to keep the connections open longer. The theory was, if we could get the new mobile users in and out as fast as possible, they'd be finished and we'd settle down.

That didn't work. Time for Plan B.

Plan B
Plan B was to distribute the load. We do this now in our publications and it works wonderfully (or it did until we added the Mobile Editions). If you read PalmPower in its first eight months (from about January of 1998 to about August of 1998), you probably noticed that when we launched a new issue, you couldn't get into the site.

That's because we have an interesting pattern of readership. Right after we finish a new issue, we send out a mailing to all our readers telling them about it. And right after that, a whole bunch of you dive into our site in an attempt to read it.

Well, back in the first eight months of 1998, we fed our publications through one ISDN line, handling about 128K worth of bandwidth. When the issue launched, that bandwidth got consumed in seconds. Think about it. If your 56K modem connection is a straw, our ISDN connection was like a kitchen sink pipe. A bit thicker, a bit stronger, but not massive.

We needed massive.

So in August of 1998, we began to distribute our servers. We added a series of servers (located in Pittsburgh) that had twin DS-3 connections. If an ISDN line is like a kitchen pipe, a DS-3 is like the Holland Tunnel in terms of bandwidth. Massive.