Comment by alibarber
2 days ago
To be fair - it's a repository for academic documents at a reasonably-sized-but-still-quite-small university. Their priorities were probably closer to handling few complex requests and being able to manage obscure documents, not dealing with Netflix level traffic.
It'll probably make for a cool story for the sysadmins there, but I doubt there will be a board meeting tomorrow to re-evaluate the web strategy.
Wasn't my intention at all to imply that they did something wrong and need to scramble to fix it. Just observing that a large portion of the web is built around the assumption that traffic is intermittent, where even a small burst of requests can knock it over. No shade — I've built plenty of sites like that.