FlightRadar24 crashes due to surge in users tracking SPAR19

https://twitter.com/flightradar24/status/1554457269714264066

by jeswin • 4 years ago

200 88 4 years ago

twitter.com

4cao2• 4 years ago

ADS-B Exchange works fine: https://globe.adsbexchange.com/?icao=ae503d

Edit: FR24 link for comparison: https://www.flightradar24.com/SPAR19/2ce4f83f

nyanpasu64• 4 years ago

I like ADS-B Exchange and all for being a (purportedly unfiltered) data stream based off community volunteers uploading data from SDR stations (I even briefly ran a data source), but it's missing data for the middle of the flight.

4cao2• 4 years ago

Yeah, seems they don't have much coverage in Indonesia and the Philippines. I wonder if FR24 (which was showing the flight path correctly all along) depends on private uploaders there, or do they have other data sources to fill the gaps.

implements• 4 years ago

Yep, it doesn’t filter military flights (which has been interesting recently - toggle by clicking the “U” UI button)

closetohome• 4 years ago

I like to bring this up whenever FlightRadar24 is mentioned.

They heavily censor their feed. Not only for military aircraft, but they also have a service where you can pay to have your aircraft hidden by the system.

Personally my beef with them is that they started as a paid app, then transitioned to a subscription model and left everyone who bought the app hanging.

coin• 4 years ago

FR24 also uses a network of volunteer feeders. The difference is that FR24 uses that volunteer data and monetizes it. ADSB Exchange shares it back to the community.

jollyllama• 4 years ago

Flightaware is also working https://flightaware.com/live/flight/SPAR19 brought to you by the TCL coding language.

nell2• 4 years ago

In an era of unlimited scaling infrastructure, it's a shame they're struggling to capitalize on an exclusive superbowl scale marketing event. It was predictable days in advance.

seydor• 4 years ago

Do they really want lots of traffic? It's a very specialized website, it's not like the traffic will stick. The people who want to pay for their services are already customers. I doubt they care about random Joe

polio• 4 years ago

This is exactly it. It's likely a better business decision to just crash in this scenario.

alldayeveryday4• 4 years ago

Days is not enough advance notice, if for example they don't have a way to monetize the traffic. Unlimited scale = unlimited cost. Potentially the site crashing was the financially appropriate outcome.

nnx• 4 years ago

Days in advance would have been enough to prepare a static page for SPAR19 alone, updated minutely or something... would cost practically nothing, especially if served from CDN edges.

cosmolev• 4 years ago

They surely do know how to monetize the traffic. Banners are all over the website.

kragen5• 4 years ago

It's not unlimited scale, it was just over 700_000 people according to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32320697. If your web page is 100 kilobytes, which seems like the maximum that would be reasonable, that's 70 gigabytes of traffic. AWS charges US$0.09 per GB so this is US$7. If you eliminate the cloud premium it's closer to US$1.

In fact loading their home page takes 3.1 MB for me over two minutes. Searching for a flight (AAL301 in this case since SPAR19 has already landed) brings this to 3.8 MB. At this size it would be 266 gigabytes, US$27. Reloading the page, I see that this was about 180 HTTP hits, though a lot of those were ads (I guess they have a way to monetize the traffic) which were blocked by uBlock Origin.

But doesn't it take a lot of CPU and RAM to serve 700_000 page views, especially at 180 hits per page view? That's 126 million hits, after all! Well, of course you can write your code arbitrarily inefficiently. According to https://crozdesk.com/software/fastly/pricing Fastly charges US$0.0075 per ten thousand hits, so if you could serve all those hits from Fastly it would cost you just under US$100. And probably if you're getting 700_000 people looking at the same thing you should figure out how to make all those hits cacheable either in Fastly or in something slower but cheaper. This probably isn't the first popular flight on FlightRadar24, even if it's the first one that's this popular.

(Also though you probably don't need 180 hits to serve up a single page. One for HTML, one for JS, one for CSS, one for an icon sprite sheet, and maybe half a dozen map tiles. The cause of death was a self-inflicted wound.)

What if we want to know the minimal CPU cost to serve up 126 million hits rather than the minimal dollar cost for someone else to serve them up for you? Well, one weekend a few years ago I wrote a static file HTTP web server called httpdito-386: http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/server.s (docs in http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/httpdito-readme). It's 710 lines of code and can handle 20_000-30_000 hits per second on my ten-year-old laptop (8 cores) and push about 1.8 gigabits per second of traffic. It's not the most efficient web server (it forks a new process for every connection and drops the connection after handling the first request) but it's probably adequate to get a ballpark figure.

Serving up 126 million hits with httpdito would take 84 minutes on my ten-year-old laptop, so probably you'd have needed 2-5 server machines, or one machine that wasn't ten years old. Serving up 70 gigabytes in a smaller number of hits would have taken 5 minutes.

Of course, the whole point of FlightRadar24 is that it's giving you dynamically updated Comet information about where flights are, not just serving up precomputed files from the filesystem. You could implement this kind of functionality by polling, but using Comet would probably be more efficient. Maintaining 700_000 open connections is easily within the capacity of a single server today; we were doing several thousand on our Comet server at KnowNow in 02000, using what we called RUTH (Robert's Ugly Thttpd Hack), using select() on a 32-bit machine with a gigabyte of RAM and a gigahertz.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32319147 says, "Use one big server." The associated article https://specbranch.com/posts/one-big-server/ profiles the servers they use at Azure: two 64-core CPUs with a 2-2.5 GHz clock, 4-6 instructions per clock, 256 MiB (MB?) of L3 cache, and 1 TiB (TB?) of RAM. From the cloud pricing they're citing, buying one probably costs about US$15k, roughly the cost of one programmer-week. According to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32321406, FlightRadar24's revenue in 02021 was US$25M, so this would be a little less than 6 hours of their revenue.

There's no excuse.

nell2• 4 years ago

Their infrastructure might very well be setup in a way that can't scale.

They don't need unlimited scaling for the entire site, just enough to scale for one particular plane.

They make money from ads and subscriptions. Any such business pays for user acquisition and a % of users convert to subscriptions.

Even if all this is spiky traffic, their site probably has now had millions of first-time users. When traffic dies down, they will settle back at a higher than previous usual levels.

tjpnz2• 4 years ago

Having used it for many years I cannot recall a time when it's been fast.

sdfgdfghj• 4 years ago

A single employee live-streaming on Twitch would do the trick. :) Flithradar24 can pay me later for the tip.

falcolas• 4 years ago

Bank accounts ultimately put a hard cap on scaling infrastructure. Considering most folks use this service for free, I can't imagine they'd want to let those free users DDOS their bank account into bankruptcy.

Cloud infrastructure is expensive.

petethepig• 4 years ago

I’d argue they got more coverage because they went down.

Scoundreller2• 4 years ago

Your estimated wait time is more than 16 hours...

Hrmmm

dylan604• 4 years ago

They have to wait for the person on the plane to disembark and find a pay phone to call back to the home office to let some one know they landed safely.

valevk• 4 years ago

What's SPAR19 all about?

boardwaalk• 4 years ago

The plane carrying Nancy Pelosi around Asia and possibly to Taiwan I presume.

scanny• 4 years ago

Nancy Pelosi is about to land in Taiwan on that flight, China has been threatening some sort of action (military/economic/angry words) if it were to happen.

xnorswap• 4 years ago

What's SPAR19 and why are so many interested?

Also flightradar24 feels something that should benefit heavily from caching especially in an instance where lots of people are all tracking the same thing.

Heavier caching for non-logged in users is a basic of keeping sites up against unexpected influx because the vast majority of "new" (i.e. spikey) traffic won't have accounts, and won't be as fuzzy about seeing cached data, and are harder to monetize than logged in accounts.

ojbyrne• 4 years ago

Will Nancy Pelosi visit Taiwan? https://www.cnn.com/2022/08/02/politics/pelosi-taiwan-risks-...

Rebelgecko• 4 years ago

Where does Betteridge's Law come into play?

wobblyasp• 4 years ago

Pelosi's flight into Taiwan

dboreham• 4 years ago

Seems like a significant security risk that it is publicly trackable?

I've seen AF1 land at the airport here (Bozeman) -- it flew in to the area at high altitude then circled tightly reducing altitude until final approach. I assumed to reduce the chance of a stinger hit from mountain-men.

input_sh• 4 years ago

What's SPAR19 and why are so many interested?

Nancy Pelosi visiting Taiwan, which China is opposed to.

tomohawk• 4 years ago

Nancy Pelosi is the Speaker of the US House of Representatives. She is 2 heartbeats away from being President (she would become president if both the President and Vice President became incapacitated).

The House is similar to the UK Parliament. She is elected to her position by the members of the House.

Since Democracts control the House this term, they elected Nancy Pelosi as Speaker for this term.

The President has primary responsibility for foreign affairs. The Speaker taking this action could be interpretted as stepping on the toes of the President, or could have tacit approval of the President as a kind of stalking horse.

baybal2• 4 years ago

BTW, Nancy has just landed in the Republic of China

pdabbadabba3• 4 years ago

For the confused: "Republic of China" is Taiwan's official name. Yes, this makes the other China -- the People's Republic of China -- quite angry.

kmonsen3• 4 years ago

Actually no, not calling it republic of China would make the other China angry. Taiwan would like to call itself Taiwan.

tjpnz2• 4 years ago

Any theories on the protracted flightpath? Was the proximity to bases in Okinawa a factor?

phantomathkg• 4 years ago

Hypothesis would be to avoid South China Sea, instead choose a detour to get covered by all US arm presence in the the Pacific and Okinawa.

NovemberWhiskey• 4 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Territorial_disputes_in_the_So...

This is more likely to be about not overflying China/PRC's disputed territorial claims in the South China Sea - the flight certainly has to overfly part of that claim (because it in includes Taiwan/ROC), but it doesn't have to fly over all of it ... seems like some kind of carefully calibrated diplomatic message / inside baseball.

yrcyrc• 4 years ago

Update: She's just landed in Taipei

whatever1• 4 years ago

Showdown!

high_5• 4 years ago

Technically speaking we only know the plane landed through this information. But will Pelosi set foot on Taiwanese soil?

sct202• 4 years ago

She got off the plane. Taiwan livestreamed the landing and greeting when everyone got off https://youtu.be/VfzTZyZTv5I?t=1701

spywaregorilla• 4 years ago

Am amused at the baby blue and pink colored suits the two people are wearing.

paxys• 4 years ago

I imagine she didn't go there just because she loves long plane rides.

popotamonga• 4 years ago

Couldn't they just write all locations say to a public s3 file, maybe separated by geo squares depending on your viewport? client would just keep polling the s3 file(s). Unlimited bandwidth (at a cost yes..)

jjoonathan• 4 years ago

The core infrastructure might have calcified long before s3 even existed, but yeah, these days that's a pretty good approach.

jasonwatkinspdx• 4 years ago

Back when S3 and EC2 were brand spanking new services, and EC2 didn't have persistent disks, I got to see a quite well designed analytics pipeline. The inbound tracking http requests went into a pool that aggregated them locally in mysql, then wrote out the database files to S3. A separate pool would pull down these files and merge them into a local mysql databases for the web app UI. So kindof like a very simplistic map reduce atop s3 using mysql ISAM files.

It was impressively simple to keep running, and they easily scaled it to handle massive spikes related to sports events and such. The only real downside is the delay in new data hitting the UI layer, but this was built out while a lot of people still had webtrends installs kicking around, so it was perfectly acceptable for their customers.

prescriptivist• 4 years ago

Before I clicked on the link I assumed this was Taylor Swifts plane.

hammock• 4 years ago

I flew on this one time. Yes, they play Tswift when you embark and disembark.

https://www.yesterdaysairlines.com/airline-history-blog/shak...

kklisura• 4 years ago

With 708,000 people tracking the aircraft upon landing in Taipei, SPAR19 is Flightradar24’s most tracked live flight of all time. [1]

[1] https://twitter.com/flightradar24/status/1554501909893062656

owenfi• 4 years ago

Flight…CRASHES…SPAR19.

I’m sure it wasn’t intentional but this word in a high profile airline headline is a bit jarring.

dvh• 4 years ago

I also couldn't connect so I just searched "spar19 live" on YouTube and there were 5 livestreams so I watched that.

_joel• 4 years ago

Previous job roles posted by the company suggest that it runs a mixed system infrastructure “based on a modern virtualized data center environment as well as AWS and Azure cloud services” — with the SRE role suggesting that it was building a “future private cloud based on open technologies like OpenStack, Ceph, and KVM.” [1]

Sounds like they needed a monolith, single server ;) (tongue in cheek, I know it's not that simple)

[1] https://thestack.technology/air-traffic-tracking-site-flight...

water8• 4 years ago

We’re not going to Taiwan we’re going to China… what aren’t they going to be there? ;)

klee0102• 4 years ago

It didn't crash I keep checking.

jdubz79• 4 years ago

Its the piss in Winnie the Pooh's Cheerios Tour 2022!

FlightRadar24 crashes due to surge in users tracking SPAR19

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