Computer Users Looking for Comet Images Clog Internet

[David Farber <farber@central.cis.upenn.edu>]

Computer Users Looking for Comet Images Clog Internet
By Joshua Quittner
(c) 1994, Newsday
    Traffic on the Internet slowed to a crawl Tuesday as thou-
sands of people all over the world went online to rubberneck at
pictures of comet chunks hitting Jupiter.
    Outer space met cyberspace, and for hours, it seemed like a
parking space, as scientists and curious onlookers attempted to
connect over the global web to a half a dozen computers that con-
tained the latest photos of the comet Shoemaker-Levy 9.
    ``It's a phenomenal event that's taking place and the tech-
nology is allowing the global community -- even if they're not
interested in astronomy -- to take part in it and see it, in
real time. The problem is, the machines that are serving the
information just can't keep up with it,'' said Gene Feldman, a
scientist at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.,
 which has one of the more popular computer archives of the comet images
available to the public for free on the Internet.
    More than 2,000 people an hour were attempting to connect to
Goddard's computer, which can handle only 30 users at a time. The
computer that archives images there crashed briefly Tuesday morn-
ing when 4,000 people attempted to log on at once. From 1 a.m.
until 3 p.m. Tuesday, more than 11,600 people connected to the
site and downloaded images and text pertaining to the comet
crash.
    Because the computers are open to the public and require no
passwords, getting the images was a matter of first come, first
served. Reports abounded of astronomers trying without success to
view the latest images, transmitted to Internet-connected obser-
vatories.
    `` `Trying' is the operative word -- I've been trying all
morning, but the connections just aren't being made,'' said
Gareth Williams, associate director of the Minor Planet Center at
the Harvard/Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. ``I've managed
to get to a site in Sweden that had some images, but the Jet
Propulsion Laboratory and European Southern Observatory have been
clogged all day and they were clogged all day yesterday.
    ``It's never been as bad as this,'' he added. ``This is the
first time I've tried a half-dozen machines and they've all been
unavailable.''
    Part of the problem was the sheer number of people attempting
to connect to certain sites at one time. But another problem had
to do with what network engineers refer to as bandwidth, or the
capacity to carry information across the network. Images -- still
photographs and video _ require more bandwidth than simple text,
and that tended to congest the thousands of networks that
converge to form the sprawling Internet.
    ``This is the first time I ever noticed this kind of slow-
down,'' said Steve Wolff, who oversees the NSFNet, the giant,
high-speed backbone that carries much of the data between federal
research facilities on the Internet. Wolff said, however, that
the slowdown could have been worsened by a more general, and un-
related, network glitch, which was being investigated by
engineers late Tuesday.    ``I think this is just a blip, but it's clearly
significant
and it's a harbinger of things to come,'' Wolff added. ``As these
services become more popular, it means networks will have to be
beefed up and more capacity added, as more people use them.''
    Some commercial online services, too, noted peak interest in
the comet. America Online, for instance, reported that 5,000
people had downloaded a comet-impact image during a 24-hour peri-
od ending Monday. The service was not, however, reporting any
problems, because it is designed to handle so many users at one
time.
    ``At America Online, if you want to download an image, guess
what? You pay for it!'' said Cliff Stoll, whose book, ``The Cuck-
oo's Egg,'' was the first to demystify the Internet and helped
spark public interest in it. ``On the Internet, it's free to go
from San Francisco to New York. The Lincoln Tunnel has no toll
and all your gasoline is paid for. And guess what? Everyone takes
it.''
    ``We think of the Internet as offering information for free,
that downloading something doesn't cost money. But it costs some-
one money somewhere. Until the people using the information pay
for it, they won't have a sense of its value.''


    Distributed by the Los Angeles Times-Washington Post News
Service


AP-NY-07-19-94 2129EDT