Congress' network braces for Net rush

In the hours after House leaders said the report would be made available over the Internet, staff members worked Thursday to build a network of mirror sites that they hoped would spread the server load - which could shape up as one of the Internet's heaviest traffic days yet.

"We'll be able to handle the traffic," said Jason Poblete, spokesman for the House Oversight Committee.

Four addresses
As of Thursday evening, four separate addresses had been set up for access in advance of the report's release, on the Library of Congress' Thomas information server as well as servers for the House of Representatives, the House Judiciary Committee and the Government Printing Office. Poblete indicated that other government sites might being recruited in the effort as well.

In addition, private-access sites have been set up for members of Congress and their staffs as well as media organizations. Soon after the House releases the report, it will become available via MSNBC and hundreds of other online publications.

If past experience is any guide, the House will need all the help it can get on the Net. Poblete said traffic was already on the upswing Thursday afternoon, at least 24 hours before the expected release of the report.

He said the House server has handled 60,000 hits per hour in the past. "We have hit about a million hits in a day during (U.S. Rep.) Sonny Bono's funeral, and we've never had a crash," he said.

Past milestones
Even that figure, however, pales in comparison with some of the past big events on the Web. On its peak day, the network of Web sites put together for NASA's Mars Pathfinder mission recorded 46.9 million hits - many of which were handled by heavy-duty servers operated by corporate partners such as Sun Microsystems, Silicon Graphics, AT&T and CompuServe.

And the Web site set up for President Bill Clinton's 1997 inaugural ceremony hit peak loads of 3,000 hits per second (putting the East Coast's Internet backbone under significant stress in the process).

In addition to sheer traffic, the House will have to be ready for the unexpected glitch. For example, a much-ballyhooed attempt to distribute legal documents in the case of former nanny Louise Woodward last November went awry when a circuit breaker blew, knocking the court's Internet service provider out of commission.

Guerilla tactics
Network administrators listed several tactics that would help ease the load and keep Web-surfing taxpayers from getting "Server Too Busy" and "Connection Refused" messages:

Recruit as many mirror sites as possible. The House's computer experts are clearly following this advice. "The main thing that we would look at, especially in a situation where we've got a short turnaround, is trying to spread the load," said Brian Dunbar, Internet services manager for NASA headquarters.

Keep it simple. Plain text documents take much less time to download than graphics or specially formatted files such as Adobe Acrobat PDF documents. Also, the document should be distributed as a series of smaller sections rather than one big download.

Geography matters
The servers should be distributed as far apart as possible to spread the traffic over the Internet's global thoroughfares. They also should be as close as possible to the Net's major connection points, such as MAE East and MAE West, with the biggest possible "pipeline" for data transfer.

If a lot of data is being distributed at the same time from the same area, "it can cause disruption at the major exchange points," said Antonio Salerno, chief executive officer of ConXioN, an Internet delivery service provider. ConXioN provides download services for Microsoft Corp., which is a partner in the joint venture that operates MSNBC.

"When we pump hard, the bandwidth is really up and you will notice that the Internet will slow down. It actually does go slower. The traffic jam model works really well," Salerno said.

Speaking hypothetically about the Starr report, Salerno said: "If these servers are jammed, and they're delivering a lot of bandwidth, then you're going to see a lot of disruption in the Washington, D.C., area first, and then it will get less worse as you move away from the Washington area."

If you can't get the report on the Internet, there's always the dead-trees version: Pocket Books announced that it would have a paperback version of the report on the shelves by Tuesday.