Stats show Ubuntu 8.04 a hit

By Paul Vecchiatto for TENET
Cape Town, 25 Apr 2008

Yesterday's release of Ubuntu version 8.04 proved such a hit with local and international users that the mirror server (mirror.ac.za) run by Tenet ran out of memory and had to be reconfigured to accommodate demand.

Andrew Alston, CTO of Tenet (Tertiary Education Network), says the server could not handle the load and ran out of RAM. After a reconfiguration, it was up and running again, he adds.

Tenet is the national research and education network owned by the universities to provide Internet bandwidth and services, which it does to about 40 research institutions, including about 23 universities.

The demand for the free downloading of Ubuntu is illustrated in the statistics released by Tenet. Within the past 24-hour period, demand for the downloads peaked at 393Mbps, with this morning's average being 237Mbps, and the average for the last 24 hours being 264Mbps from the time of release yesterday.

During the period, more than 2.55Tb of data had been transmitted from the mirror server. This equates to a 2 500 times the capacity of a normal Telkom-type DSL account.

Tenet's statistics show the Web servers peaked at around 120 hits per second and the maximum established connections across all servers was about 13 000.

"We peaked on national traffic at a little over 240Mb combined, though it only averaged about 150Mbps for most of the high traffic period. Currently the servers are pushing 242Mbps, with the international segment being approximately 130Mbps," Alston says.

Peer freely

The mirror servers are located in Johannesburg and Cape Town using an any casting format, to allow those located near the relevant server to be routed there, while international traffic is routed on a round robin basis.

Alston says the server not only hosts Ubuntu downloads, but is also the site for the downloading of other open source content and applications such as Web browser Firefox updates. It also hosts large academic data sets.

He says Tenet could not make so much bandwidth available because of the high-speed peering across the network. This consists of one 10Gb peer to Internet Solutions in Cape Town and another in Johannesburg to the company. There is also a 1Gb peer to Jinx (Johannesburg Internet Exchange).

"The more ISPs that peer freely, the better the bandwidth capacity. Unfortunately, not all do so, resulting in reduced speeds," Alston notes.

Open source systems, such as Ubuntu, are particularly popular among South African academia as they are free. However, Alston points out that the new releases of Ubuntu and other open source systems are increasing in popularity as the software becomes more stable and includes more features.

Unbuntu 8.04 has the latest version of Mozilla's Firefox 3 (Beta 5) and advanced default photo manager Fspot.