Found this on ZDNet. Just thought I'd share it.
"South Park" site dies from
workload
By Matthew Broersma
October 21, 1997 5:42 PM PDT
ZDNN "South Park" is at the moment a victim of its own
cyberspace success. For a few brief weeks, episodes of the cheerfully
obscene TV cartoon were available to all via the
Internet. But "This Week on South Park," the site
that stored away episodes of the program in
digital form, is no more. And it's not the work of copyright-sensitive TV
lawyers, either: The site is a victim of its own
popularity. Unfortunately, as the "South Park" incident
confirms, the Web just isn't ready to handle the
adoration of the masses -- at least when it comes
to high-bandwidth cartoon content. The TV incarnation of "South Park" owes a lot to
the Internet. Many of its followers got their first
exposure to the show through digital copies of its
prototype, a five-minute cartoon called "The Spirit
of Christmas," distributed through a handful of
Web sites in the form of a 53M-byte movie file.
When Comedy Central launched the half-hour
program August 13, it started an E-mail list of
fans, the South Park Boosters. The list has
already grown to include 16,000 members, and
the show accounts for about half the traffic on
Comedy Central's Web site, according to the
channel. The Web connection worked. Comedy Central
recently ordered 13 more episodes of the show,
which will go into production in 1998. Hooked on the show from the beginning, Joseph
Hager decided to make it available even to those
without access to Comedy Central. His plan was
to digitize every show, then post it on his Web
site. The Drexel University sophomore used an
aging Mac to digitize the first six episodes and
convert them to RealVideo, a compressed,
streaming format that allows users to watch video
as it downloads. "People were really downloading ["The Spirit of
Christmas"] even though it was a 53M-byte file,"
Hager said. "I figured they wouldn't mind
streaming it in real-time." Indeed they didn't mind. Hager said logs at his
ISP showed his site was getting over 6,000 hits a
day, and the RealVideo server was never sending
fewer than 20 video streams, 24 hours a day. At
peak times it received 1,000 hits an hour. "Just standing in the room, the hard drive never
stopped grinding," said Hager, a computer
science major who also works at the ISP. "I'm
surprised it didn't take down the system." But the real strain, apparently, was on the ISP's
hub, which connected all the servers to the
Internet. A hub warning light that usually flickered
under normal traffic was suddenly demanding
more attention. "There was so much activity, that
indicator was a constant orange glow," Hager
said. A week ago, while Hager was off work, the ISP's
owner came by, Hager said, and noticed the
orange hub light. The RealVideo server was shut
off. For now, Internet users will have to either turn on
their TV to find "South Park" reruns, or wait until
another enterprising fan finds a way to make three
hours of cartoon entertainment available to the
hungry masses. While Hager said he has no plans to put the
videos up again, his page now lists a couple of
locations offering two episodes of the show.For now.