The servers of SA's academic network Tenet managed to pump out 160 000 downloads of Mozilla's Firefox version 3 yesterday, contributing to setting a world record for the number of downloads in one day.
Andrew Alston, tenet CTO says Tenet's four servers (two each in Cape Town and Johannesburg) experienced a total of about 180 000 hits since 7pm last night (Download Day) until this morning, and that was done over a line with the capacity of about 200 megabits per second.
He says the vast majority of the hits were referrals from the Mozilla servers that fell over just after Download Day began, so contributing to its own denial of service attack.
"We were extremely proud that our servers ran continuously throughout. We had no outages whatsoever because of the load balancing," Alston said.
Tenet's statistics show that its two Johannesburg servers downloaded 55 000 and 46 300 hits and the two Cape Town servers downloaded 75 000 and 6 000 hits, respectively.
Tenet's involvement in Download Day is part of its efforts to make spare capacity available to the community at large.
"If we examine our traffic patterns by bandwidth, we pull a lot more information than we generally push. The mirror servers were installed to bring content into the country, mainly for the academic institutions, but then we allow the spare capacity to be opened to the public," Alston said.
He said that Tenet's mirror servers had push about 110 million updates of Firefox version 2 during the two-and-half-year lifespan of that browser, but that a new release presented more challenges.
While the latest results on Download Day were not available, several international news sources state that up to seven million downloads may have happened and this should set a Guinness World Record.
"Ironically, there is no such record and so it doesn't matter how many downloads actually happen, because they have the record," Alston says.
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