Penny Arcade Holiday Strip Series #1

While normally we don't do this sort of thing, recent charity work with Child's Play has substantially increased the bandwidth demands over at Penny Arcade. To assist Gabe & Tycho, and keep their site running slightly faster than a snails-pace, we're co-hosting their seasonal holiday strip series "The Last Christmas". The cover and the first page are attached to this story (future pages in coming days), so read on and enjoy until we hit our bandwidth limits! (Warning: Comic may contain Cthulhu)

One page?

[Hatta]

I'm a little confused. We read this one page at a time? When does the next page come?

Bandwith = getting killed?

[FiReaNGeL]

Its slooooooooooow as hell even when hosted on /. ...

I guess its why Slashdot don't offer to mirror sites they're going to link to on the mainpage.

duplicity?

[Anonymous Coward]

So Slashdot will host penny-arcade's strip because of bandwidth concerns, but they won't mirror the websites they hammer into the ground?

Re:uhh

[cot]

It doesn't sound like they're paying for bandwidth with it, it sounds like they drive is causing more bandwidth USAGE that they can't afford.

Re:uhh

[nomadic]

It doesn't sound like they're paying for bandwidth with it, it sounds like they drive is causing more bandwidth USAGE that they can't afford.

Yes, that's my point, the way the editors phrased it conveys the exact opposite of what they meant to. Like I said, I don't think PA did anything wrong, I just think the slashdot crew, if they're going to call themselves "editors", should put some actual editorial effort into their work. When you get paid a nice salary to maybe write a few lines a day, at least do a good job.

Re:CTHULU_29041 took your flag!

[JaffaKREE]

You got modded off topic for mentioning Cthulthu in a story not only about a Cthulthu comic, but containing a picture of Cthulthu on the same page. My hat goes off to you, sir.

FOR THE LOVE OF CTHULHU!

[Guspaz]

USE CORAL!

I mean honestly. Coral is precicesly what this situation was designed for. Penny-Arcade could significantly reduce their bandwidth usage by coralizing the comics. Heck, even Slashdot could get a major speedup on their hosting these christmas pages by using Coral for the links.

Here are the coralized versions of the Slashdot-hosted images... If a few people request them they should get cached and will load like greased lightning:

http://66.35.250.242.nyud.net:8090/cover_book.jpg [nyud.net]
http://66.35.250.242.nyud.net:8090/page_1_book.jpg [nyud.net]

Re:duplicity?

[calibanDNS]

Slashdot could conceivably get into legal trouble by mirroring everything that they link to. If the editors had to take the time to contact content owners before linking, it could significantly slow down the flow of stories on Slashdot. I'm guessing that in this instance, the editors contacted Gabe and Tycho or vice versa and made an agreement to do this.

There's a Microsoft donation

[Anonymous Coward]

There's an XBox donation. There's a Gas Powered Games donation. In fact, there seems to be donations from most of the MS affiliated or owned gaming companies. Now, given that MS are evil corporate bastards, can someone show me the matching generousity from the kindhearted and loving OSS movement?

Re:How does *that* work?

[BuilderBob]

Unfortunately, Slashdot cannot be taken down by the Slashdot effect.

It's a negative feedback system. When the load increases on Slashdot's servers, the number of people who can access the site decreases, decreasing the load on the servers. Eventually, there will be an point where the inflow of new readers equals the outflow of `old' readers.

During this period the throughput will be maximum. Whether throughput==bandwidth depends on the content. The images are hopefully coming from a caching server away from the nonsense that is comment thresholds.

BB