SamLau95
commented
6 years ago https://github.com/DS-100/textbook/pull/2 removes nbinteract entirely from the Data 100 textbook. To check that this succeeded, I opened https://www.textbook.ds100.org/ch4/cleaning_1.html# and verified in the Network tab of the devtools that the page makes no requests to mybinder.org.
If there are no further requests to launch Binder images for the textbook, this suggests that some lingering bug in the Javascript implementation overloaded the Binder servers. If there are still requests for the textbook Binder image, we might have a caching issue or something else entirely. I'll wait on Yuvi to get back to us.
yuvipanda
betatim
minrk
choldgraf
https://github.com/SamLau95/nbinteract/issues/33 and https://github.com/jupyterhub/binder/issues/34 report that the mybinder.org servers are overloaded with notebook servers for the nbinteract docs (https://github.com/SamLau95/nbinteract-image) and the Data 100 textbook (https://github.com/DS-100/textbook).
The morning of Feb 7, 2018, @yuvipanda wisely blocked both repos on mybinder.org and immediately saw pod usage go back to normal levels.
After Yuvi notified me of this, I made the following changes to the places where we use
nbinteract:We only start a Binder server when a user manually clicks a Run Widgets button instead of on page load. Although this was implemented a long time ago, I mis-configured the nbinteract docs and Data 100 textbook (my bad!).
Example page with Run Widgets button: https://www.textbook.ds100.org/ch4/cleaning_1.html
To verify the implementation, I visited the page above, opened the Network tab in the dev tools, and made a hard page refresh. I checked that the page makes no requests to
mybinder.orguntil the Run Widgets button is clicked.Following @minrk 's suggestion, I cache Binder server information in
localStorageto re-use servers across page refreshes.To verify the implementation, I started a local notebook server and opened a page that used
nbinteractlocally. I checked that the page re-uses the same kernel across page refreshes and hard refreshes.After I made these changes, Yuvi unblocked us but had to immediately block us again because mybinder.org was still getting hammered with notebook requests!
My first thought was that many students were visiting the Data 100 textbook with old versions of Javascript cached by their browsers. However, it looks like neither nbinteract docs nor Data 100 textbook got enough traffic to produce the load that the Binder team reported. Here are the pageviews plotted for each hour from 12am-3pm Feb 7, 2018 (Yuvi blocked us for the second time at around 2pm):
Data 100 textbook:
nbinteract docs:
There were a max of 25 pageviews during any given hour across both of these Gitbooks, far below the numerous notebook requests that the mybinder.org servers received. The pageview data is from Google Analytics and matches the separately generated pageview data from the built-in Gitbook platform so I'm inclined to believe its faithfulness.
It looks like something else is going on but I'm not sure what it could be. Here are some possibilities:
curl).To distinguish between 1), 2), or other possibilities we'll want to know which IPs, devices, and user agents are generating these requests.
@yuvipanda @choldgraf @minrk @betatim Do you have any thoughts or suggestions?