This time around it was ABC Radio Ballarat, who had seen my recent posts on the Ballarat line through Bacchus Marsh and curve easing for faster trains, and thought it would be of interest to their listeners.

I said yes, and so I was up early the next morning jabbering on about the history of the Ballarat line.

We’ve seen a lot of changes to the Ballarat train line over the last couple decades, but it’s only when you piece it all together that you see the sheer scale of the works that have been done.

Marcus Wong is an avid train fan and has been writing about the Ballarat line over the past few weeks on his blog Waking Up in Geelong, unearthing some answers to the strange quirks in how it was built.

You can check me out at the ABC Radio website.

Or listen to it below.

Unfortunately the recording cuts off abruptly at the end, but luckily it’s only the last 30 seconds or so.

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The story started on May 25, when somebody on Reddit posted a photo titled “I want to go down the forbidden ramp at Southern Cross Station. I’ve got no idea what’s down there, but I’m assuming dragons?” over at /r/Melbourne.

Now I’ve got a lot of photos online showing the old underpass beneath the station, so it wasn’t long before someone shared them to the thread.

Setting off the hits on my photo gallery.

By July 2021 piece on the remains of the Spencer Street Station subway also got a run, alongside my follow up piece Building the Spencer Street Station subway – a history.

Victorian Railways annual report 1961-62

Then the next morning something different – messages via various channels from a producer at ABC Radio Melbourne.

Hey Marcus

Is there a number I can call you on?

Love to chat to you about the Southern cross tunnels…

Anyway, I gave them a ring, and later that day I was on the radio blabbering on about the tunnels at Southern Cross Station.

Which was then followed by a handful of text messages and emails from friends and family who listen to ABC Radio and heard me on air.

You can listen to it at the ABC Radio website, or below.

Footnote

I even managed in to slip in a bonus piece into the interview – why the Western Ring Road takes a kink around Ardeer.

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Later that day I noticed that my website was now running rather sluggishly, so checked the logs – an explosion in traffic.

And the reason – someone over at Hacker News had shared a link to it, and it was getting heaps of traffic.

I’m an occasional visitor to the site, which is a social news website like Reddit, but with a focus on computer science and entrepreneurship – so I was kinda surprised to see it getting a run over there.

Of course, given the tech background of the readers, discussion soon went off onto the ‘hug of death‘ all of the traffic was giving my poor web server.

As well as jokes about the poor state of Australia’s internet.

And fixing it?

I run my websites on a virtual private server (VPS) that I manage myself, so unfortunately for me I was on my to manage the flood of traffic.

My initial solution was the simplest, but also costly – just scale up my server to one with twice the CPU cores and twice the RAM.

That made my site more responsive, but I didn’t want to double my monthly web hosting costs, so it was time to get smart. These symptoms sounded exactly like my server.

If your VPS gets overloaded, and reaches the maximum number of clients it can serve at once, it will serve those and other users will simply get a quick failure. They can then reload the page and maybe have greater success on the second try.

This sounds bad, but believe me, it’s much better to have these connections close quickly but leave the server in a healthy state rather than hanging open for an eternity. Surprisingly you can get better performance from a server that has fewer child processes but responds faster than it is to have a server with more child processes that it is unable to handle.

I had to dig into the settings of Apache to optimise them for the resources my server had available.

Most operating systems’ default Apache configurations are not well suited for smaller servers – 25 child processes or more is common. If each of your Apache child processes uses 120MB of RAM, then your VPS would need 3GB just for Apache.

One visitor’s web browser may request 4 items from the website at once, so with only 7 or 8 people trying to load a page at the same time your cloud server can become overloaded. This causes the web page to hang in a constantly loading state for what seems like an eternity.

It is often the case that the server will keep these dead Apache processes active, attempting to serve content long after the user gave up, which reduces the number of processes available to serve users and reduces the amount of system RAM available. This causes what is commonly known as a downward spiral that ends in a bad experience for both you and your site’s visitors.

What you should do is figure out how much RAM your application needs, and then figure out how much is left, and allocate most of that to Apache.

I used the handy apache2buddy tool to analyse the RAM usage on my server, and calculate the maximum number of processes Apache should be allowed to spin up.

And since making these changes, the uptime of my websites has skyrocketed.

The status page found above is powered by the “Cloudflare Worker – Status Page” tool created by Adam Janiš.

Footnote: the ‘Slashdot effect’

Having your website taken down when a popular site links to you has been a thing for years – it’s called the ‘Slashdot effect‘ after one of the early social news websites of the 2000s – Slashdot.

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It also got a run in The Age – Yarra Trams investigates alleged racial abuse – which also got a number of views (at least until Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 took over the front page again).

Media interest

My first mention in the media was in the Melbourne Express section of The Age at 7:34am. Journalist Angus Holland compiles the section, and he follows me on Twitter, which probably explains the fast response.

By 8am the flood of messages on Twitter started – first contact was another journalist from The Age, followed by Nine News dropping me a line at 9am. Soon after that I got a message from somebody else from Nine News, as well as a third journalist at The Age (turns out story leads at a newspaper get passed around during the course of the day, depending on which journalist is available).

Radio stations got into the act later on: around 11:30am somebody from 3AW wanted to get in touch, with Austereo (home of Fox and Triple M) dropping me a message at noon, and 774 ABC Melbourne a few hours later.

While Channel Nine was the first television station to contact me, it took a bit longer for the other two commercial stations to track me down: 7 News Melbourne didn’t message me until almost 2pm, while Channel 10 took a different tack – they got in touch via a little used email address and contact details tied to my domain name registration.

I wasn’t that keen to take up the radio and television interview requests, so I asked my friends on Facebook for a second opinion. One of them summed it up my concerns far better than I could have ever written:

You will have no control over what the message is, how the message is portrayed, and where it goes from there. The question is; what are you hoping to gain?

In the end, I only had a quick chat with Mex Cooper from The Age, and declined all of the television and radio interview requests.

Reactions

Following people’s reaction around the place, they fell into four groups:

• Well done, good on you for saying something.
• Public shaming of racist idiots makes my day.
• I wouldn’t get involved, who knows what they will do you and anyone else nearby.
• Defending the guy in question, stating that he is entitled to his opinion and I should but out.

In the case of the latter, there is a difference between whispering something ‘politically incorrect’ to your travel companion, and muttering it in a passive aggressive way to make the people around you feel uncomfortable and threatened.

People are entitled to believe whatever they feel like, but if you’re out in public sometims you just need to hold your tongue.

Further reading

In the mood to wade though pages of comments from Reddit users? Have fun.

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Turns out my recent post about more shops at Southern Cross Station scored a mention in the online only ‘Melbourne Express’ section of The Age.

You can find the page here.

An update

My February 25 blog post on Melbourne’s freeway ‘ghost ramps’ also got a mention in the same column.

You can find the page here.

And another

My March 11 blog post on the kink in the Western Ring Road got a mention.

You can find the page here.

Footnote

The ‘Melbourne Express’ section of The Age was launched on February 11, and is a live blog that runs from 6am and 9am, featuring random Melbourne items their journalists find on the internet. It reuses the name of a defunct Fairfax group newspaper, that was distributed for free at weekday mornings at suburban railway stations in Melbourne for a short period during 2001.

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The article, titled ‘Melbourne’s most accident-prone tram stop is in Ascot Vale‘ went live on the online edition of The Age at 12 noon on February 7, and gradually dropped down the front page as newer stories were posted.

Included in the article was a link to by blog, so my incoming traffic spiked considerably.

On an average day I get around 200 views of my site, with minor spikes if I post a new item that gets retweeted a lot on Twitter. However by the end of Friday, I had received over 2000 hits, with 800 more to come over the course of Saturday.

The last time I saw that much traffic was when I hit the front page of Reddit!

Footnote

Somebody posted the article from The Age to the /melbourne page on Reddit – this was my favorite comment.

famousninja

I just spent about half an hour just reading his blog. It’s strangely captivating, considering that I’m not really that interested in trains and such.

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My piece went online on Tuesday and got plenty of visits thanks to a number of retweets of the link on Twitter (a normal day sees around 150 views of my blog, that day I received over 400). One of the people who noticed the post was Adam Carey, transport reporter and Good Food Guide reviewer at The Age. He got in touch with me on Wednesday, asking me about doing a story referring to my research. I said yes, and he arranged for me to meet a photographer later that day to get a shot to go with the article.

The original plan was to get a photo outside the ticket barriers at Flagstaff station but getting permission from Metro might have been difficult, so we ended up at the northern end of Southern Cross Station, where a bank of Myki barriers face the Bourke Street footbridge. One thing we did notice at the new location was that commuters were trying their best to avoid getting into the photo – the photographer wanted to get passengers streaking past, which he eventually achieved.

The article was published in the Thursday edition of The Age, and when I woke up that morning I was greeted by a number of overnight mentions on Twitter:

Nice work, @aussiewongm and @adamlcarey – theage.com.au/victoria/new-m… Original fascinating blog post: wongm.com/2012/11/melbou… #Myki

— Daniel Bowen (@danielbowen) November 14, 2012

“@danielbowen: Nice work @aussiewongm & @adamlcarey – theage.com.au/victoria/new-m… Original fascinating blog post wongm.com/2012/11/melbou…” #MetroTrains

— Joc O’Connor (@JocOConnor) November 14, 2012

I also found in my email inbox interview requests from two breakfast radio programs – Red Symons on ABC 774, and Ross and John on 3AW. By the time I found them, it was already getting late in the morning and I had to get to work, and I was feeling nervous about going on live radio in front of thousands, so gave them a miss. Anyway, by the time I got to work I was already famous – somebody had already sent the link to the Age article around the office, with plenty of people commenting on it.

After getting some work done in the morning, around lunchtime I received another radio interview request, this time via phone for ABC 774 Drive with Gerard Callinan. I ummed and arred about doing it, and considered their option to prerecord a piece, but after program director reassured me they wouldn’t ask any difficult questions of me, I decided I would go live to air.

Going on live radio this arvo – ABC 774 at 5:40pm: abc.net.au/melbourne/prog…

— Marcus Wong (@aussiewongm) November 15, 2012

I ended up waiting on hold for a few minutes beyond my scheduled timeslot of 5.40pm, because the talkback callers before me kept on going on and on, but I eventually got to air. All up my interview went for six minutes, with most of it being me talking – you can find a recording of it below:

Back to work tomorrow, but with one piece of advice for others – if you are going to be featured in the newspaper, make sure you get up early for morning radio!

Further reading

New myki card readers no faster by Adam Carey, The Age, November 15, 2012.

Footnote

By the end of Thursday night, my blog had reached 1,598 views just from people searching for it – the last time the numbers got that high was in August 2012, when a blog post on my site appeared on the front page of Reddit for a few hours.

And another note

I’ve since been told that The Age comes in two different print editions: the clipping above with the photo is from the Melbourne edition, while my parents in Geelong and a friend in Ballarat both received a copy of the newspaper that lacked it.

Does everywhere outside Melbourne get an earlier edition of the newspaper to allow for the extra transport time? Or does The Age put together a different cut of news that is more relevant to the rest of the state?

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The answer was Reddit – the massive social news website where people posts links and comment on them. In my case somebody posted a link to my January 2012 blog post about Melbourne’s empty skyscraper to the /RedditDayOf subreddit, where the topic for August 13 was ‘abandoned buildings‘.

Sometime around midnight Melbourne time people upvoting the link promoted it to the front page, where I got 313 hits on the evening of August 13, and another 594 hits on the morning of August 14.

Unfortunately for me traffic from Reddit is a fickle beast, with the traffic to my blog dropping back to normal when the link disappeared back into the depths of Reddit. Such is life… but at least my website appeared to avoid the Slashdot effect!

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