Orkut Cracking?

I have been surprised that so far Orkut has remained amazingly responsive even under the incredible traffic I’m sure they’ve been getting. I still stand by my opinion that Orkut will be a success, however when trying to log in just now I was greeted with not one, but four distinct error messages each time I reloaded. This outage has been the exception rather than the rule, so I’m not particularly worried. (I still remember the day Google returned an error when I did a search.) For entertainment more than anything the screenshots of the errors are below. The first one is very verbose, more than what you usually see on production websites.

First Orkut Error Second Orkut Error Third Orkut Error Final Orkut Error

27 thoughts on “Orkut Cracking?

  1. Well, this isn’t the first time I’ve seen errors on Orkut. I haven’t seen it dump .NET errors, but I have received service not available errors, but they usually go away in a few minutes (5-15). I wonder if ASP.NET isn’t scaling as well as they had hoped.

  2. They’ve always been huge on commodity hardware and free operating systems, I can’t imagine the licensing fees they’re having to pay now to support that site. Mono? Maybe, I don’t know how far along that project is.

  3. I’ve gotten the first error before, but not the other ones. Still, little errors that go away after 15 minutes are much, much better than long outages and slow loading speeds *cough*friendster*cough*.

  4. I have been getting these errors for quite a while. Not sure why a service of this nature would launch without the proper infrastructure to support the high traffic, esspecially when Google owns it. See my post here:
    Community Overload

  5. Actually… that’s kind of misleading… the HTML allowed is actually supposed to be followed by a list of allowed HTML tags… but since there are NO html tags allowed, it appears as though that is just saying that ANY HTML is allowed 🙂

  6. ‘Not sure why a service of this nature would launch without the proper infrastructure to support the high traffic’

    Aren’t we jumping the gun a bit? It is a beta version…

  7. And you claim Orkut is way better. I am so not joining yet another semi-useless site that’s just going to make me procrastinate even more. 😛

  8. It’s interesting to wonder if Orkut (in affiliation with Google) will continue to be written in whatever crappy Microsoft scripting language they’re using, or instead they will switch to an open-source language like PHP.

    (For the record Yahoo switched to PHP from their proprietary Y! Script around May of 2003. see: http://public.yahoo.com/~radwin/talks/yahoo-phpcon2002.htm

    When I first got invited to join Orkut I was suprised to see the *.aspx extention in their URL At first I thought they were using PHP and had obfuscated their filenames (for some odd reason I can’t think of.) My curiosity continued until I did a lookup on Netcraft’s website and saw their site was running “The site orkut.com is running orkut on Linux.”

    http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph/?host=orkut.com

    Previously a they were supposedly running “Netscape-Enterprise/6 on Solaris 9.”

    Who knows if they’ll stay with their current technology, but as their site grows (like Google did) it’ll be interesting to see how their infastructure changes, if at all. Personally, I can’t see running a popular, large scale site with any Microsoft Technology, when their are so many more robust (not to mention cheaper, and less buggier) solutions out there.

    Anyone know any “inside information” about what Orkut is running or if they plan on changing anytime soon?

  9. Well, at least you can enter the site, I, after being invited, can’t even register. Between the server errors and, every permutation of my username already taken which I find hard to believe, I have been unable to join.

  10. Mognolikems appears to work but I don’t really like that ID. Now that I finally found another that worked and filled out all that information, I logged out and attempted to log in. Password failed. I give up.

  11. I would like to point out to all of the people who are worried about the errors and seeming scaling issues of orkus that it IS still only beta software – for something that the designers don’t think is quite ready to be called ready yet, it is remarkably mature is it not?

  12. … and I would like to mention that ASP.NET is extremely scalable and much easier to work with for larger projects than PHP. Plus you can re-use many of your ASP.NET application DLLs with Forms projects and you’ve a choice of five languages to work in. I like PHP for smaller projects, but for true OOP enterprise websites, ASP.NET is easily the best. It’s much easier to learn and work with than Java and as I mentioned above, it’s more stable and scalable than PHP, at least when running Microsoft IIS6. I haven’t tried Mono yet.

  13. I have been very curious about checking it out, however I have yet to be invited. See what happens when you have a real job and no time to blog or do techie things? Ahhh, how good it is to be FREE!

  14. it has been proved that .NET language is not ready for large scale projects…
    if you look around other site of such, yahoo, myspace, imvu, and others, rarely you’ll
    see them using a such newly made language and so buggy….
    indeed microsoft has done great stuff with their creations but as you have to notice, orkut isnt from
    anyway affiliated with Microsoft Co or any other bs.
    orkut is for sure to be shut down for alot of reasons
    – most users are brazlian
    – prob alot of money going to waste =) on license and stuff…
    – give a widely range of errors at least 20 times per user …
    – if there is an active user here, they will notice alot of users share porn, and sometimes child stuff on orkut
    and they arent doing any actions about this, so i guess they will be taken off…

    conclusion… orkut is the worst badly error handling page coded i have ever seen…and its way to addictiing…..

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