Pac-Man gobbles Firefox support servers

Jake Widman
Tuesday, 25 May 2010 13:13

Your IT - Entertainment

Last week's playable Pac-Man Google Doodle caused a lot of Firefox users to wonder why their browsers were suddenly playing strange beepy music. Enough of them turned to Mozilla support to nearly bring down the support servers.

May 21st was Pac-Man's 30th birthday, and Google celebrated by replacing its search page logo with a playable version of the game on a board that spelled out Google.

But the game started up without user intervention, which was fine if you were looking at it at the time. If Google was in a hidden tab or window, though, you'd just hear the startup song and wocka-wockas without any idea why.

The unexplained weird noises sent a flood of people to the Firefox support and forum sites -- enough, according to Mozilla Web developer James Socol, to threaten the entire support site.

Writing on his Coffee on the Keyboard blog, Socol reports that "Many people came to SUMO [Mozilla support] looking for an explanation, and many of them, not finding anything in the knowledge base, started posting to our forum. So many, in fact, that our database server started running out of connections.

"The pounding we took on the forums also caused replication on our slave databases to fall behind by as much as 1.25 hours, so even when we wrote an article about the noises, it didn't show up for most people.

"As Sean put it: 'We just got DDOSed by Pac Man.'"

The support team implemented a few temporary emergency measures and managed to get through the weekend.