Firefox 3 causes logjam
An attempt to to set a new Guinness World Record for the largest number of software downloads in 24 hours saw Mozilla’s servers run out of capacity last night as millions of users around the world attempted to download a copy of Firefox 3.
At 7pm last night, when Firefox 3 was officially released, many South African users struggled to even access the SpreadFirefox website let alone download the latest release. Some South African users reported the downloads being unavailable for most of the night as the servers were swamped by requests.
One user said: "It’s so sad that this little effort was put into keeping the infrastructure standing. I mean, come on, you’re wanting to set a world record attempt, surely you’re going to expect to be hit like you’ve never been hit before."
By 9am this morning the logjam had partially eased making it possible for users in South Africa to download a copy of the free browser.
In an interview with ChannelWeb Mozilla vice president of engineering for Mozilla said that the servers had been overwhelmed. "We’ve had a huge influx of requests so the systems are in fact overloaded," Schroepfer said. "The Ops team is working right now to bring up more capacity."
At 10am Wednesday morning South African time there had been more than 5 million downloads of Firefox 3, averaging around 6 000 copies a minute. At that time there had been almost 8 5000 copies downloaded in South Africa. Local users have until 8:15pm on Wednesday evening to download a copy of Firefox 3 to be part of the download record attempt.
A counter listing the total number of downloads and the downloads for major regions can be found at http://downloadcounter.sj.mozilla.com/
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