ITinfo: Linux Under The Weather

Linux To The Rescue

High-activity website relies on Linux and Apache

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Linux Under The Weather

by Dave Murphy
ISSN 1535-3613

Consistently rated in the Top Five for News, Entertainment, and Information websites by Media Metrix (formerly PC Meter), The Weather Channel website features current conditions and forecasts for over 1,700 cities world wide, along with local and regional radars. Many maps and other features are also at one's fingertips, along with weather-related news, educational material, a weather glossary, a storm encyclopedia, and seasonal features.

Weather forecasters are predicting a crazy hurricane season this year. With a predicted Hurricane Destruction Potential over 41 percent higher than the average, the year 2000 should be a busy one for hurricane information sites, especially the globally-popular weather channel.

To keep up with the anticipated load created by millions of visitors to it's website, The Weather Channel is switching to Linux-based webservers running the Apache webserver program. The flexibility of Linux and Apache and the horsepower of IBM 700 MHz Netfininity servers will face the onslaught head on into the wind.

Linux is well suited to horizontal scalability, allowing weather.com to easily and quickly increase the number of visitors it can handle. Adverse weather typically drives the number of weather.com visitors from an average of 4-5 million per day to over 25 million per day.

Scheduled to re-launch with Linux this fall, the new weather.com will also include planning tools to help people understand how the weather will affect activities such as travel, driving, outdoors, and skiing.

The site will offer expanded personalized features -- delivering information such as severe weather alerts directly to a user's pager, Palm Pilot, Web phone, email, or personal Web page.

Call for Comments

What do you think? Leave your comments on the message center.

References

The Weather Channel
IBM
The Apache Software Foundation
Message Center

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ITINFO is an electronic publication of Damar Group, Ltd., publisher of Training Express computer learning guides. Comments and submissions to info@dgl.com.

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updated June 23, 2000
http://dgl.com/itinfo/2000/it000623.html