LII Announce

Supreme Court oral arguments week of April 22

val_kimber — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 13:35:18 +0000

This week the Supreme court hears 6 cases, some of which involve criminal law and the Hobbs Act. Also being heard are cases of civil rights, employment discrimination, and harassment. The First Amendment and prostitution and sex trafficking are on the agenda as well.

Monday, April 22, 2013

11-1221 HILLMAN, JACQUELINE v. MARETTA, JUDY A.
12-10 AID, ET AL. v. ALLIANCE FOR OPEN SOCIETY INT’L.

Tuesday, April 23, 2013

11-889 TARRANT REGIONAL WATER DISTRICT v. HERRMANN, RUDOLF J., ET AL.
12-357 SEKHAR, GIRIDHAR C. v. UNITED STATES

Wednesday, April 24, 2013

12-484 UNIV. OF TX SOUTHWESTERN MED. v. NASSAR, NAIEL
12-547 METRISH, WARDEN v. LANCASTER, BURT

Supreme Court Oral Arguments week of April 15

val_kimber — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 17:47:13 +0000

This week the Supreme Court hears 6 cases.

Monday, April 15, 2013

12-167 UNITED STATES v. DAVILA, ANTHONY

12-398 ASSOC. FOR MOLECULAR PATHOLOGY v. MYRIAD GENETICS, INC., ET AL.

Tuesday, April 16, 2013

11-798 AM. TRUCKING ASSN., INC. v. LOS ANGELES, CA, ET AL.

12-399 ADOPTIVE COUPLE v. BABY GIRL, ET AL.

Wednesday, April 17, 2013

12-246 SALINAS, GENOVEVO v. TEXAS

12-418 UNITED STATES v. KEBODEAUX, ANTHONY J.

Supreme court oral arguments week of March 25

val_kimber — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 13:42:51 +0000

This week the Supreme Court hears 4 cases with topics including the Federal Aviation Administration Authorization Act, Patent Infringement, the Federal Arbitration Act, Same-sex marriage and the Defense of Marriage Act.

Monday, March 25, 2013

12-135 OXFORD HEALTH PLANS LLC v. SUTTER, JOHN I.
12-416 FEDERAL TRADE COMMISSION v. WATSON PHARMACEUTICALS, ET AL.

Tuesday, March 26, 2013

12-144 HOLLINGSWORTH, DENNIS, ET AL. v. PERRY, KRISTIN M., ET AL

Wednesday, March 27, 2013

12-307 UNITED STATES v. WINDSOR, EDITH S., ET AL.

Supreme Court oral arguments for week of March 18

val_kimber — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 14:38:19 +0000

The Supreme Court hears 6 cases next week. Topics include bankruptcy, just compensation, the Food and Drug law, the Vaccine Act, and voter registration.

Monday, March 18, 2013

11-1518 BULLOCK, RANDY C. v. BANKCHAMPAIGN, N.A.
12-71 ARIZONA, ET AL. v. INTER TRIBAL COUNCIL, ET AL.

Tuesday, March 19, 2013

12-142 MUTUAL PHARMACEUTICAL CO. v. BARTLETT, KAREN L.
12-236 SEBELIUS, SEC. OF H&HS v. CLOER, MELISSA

Wednesday, March 20, 2013

12-123 HORNE, MARVIN D., ET AL. v. DEPT. OF AGRICULTURE
12-52 DAN’S CITY USED CARS, INC. v. PELKEY, ROBERT

Site tuning as high drama

admin — Thu, 28 Feb 2013 20:46:13 +0000

LII Associate Director Sara Frug is having a bad day. It’s twelve in the afternoon, East Coast time, and the LII web site has slowed to a crawl. It’s taking 16 seconds to get a page of legal information that you could normally get in 6. The LII’s West Coast audience is just getting to the office. Between now and 5 o’clock both East and West Coast people will make heavy use of the site. Things are going from bad to worse, and they will get even worse than that before they get better.

How bad is bad? The typical load average on the LII’s production server is supposed to hover somewhere around 4; that’s what you see on a fully-utilized machine that isn’t straining. Dan Nagy, the LII’s systems administrator, is seeing 39. Dan is not eager to tell you how he knows, but a bad decision made in the course of a tune-up could take it to 300 in about 45 seconds. If that happens, the LII is about as useful as a wet brick. And the LII crew knows: the slow get slower. Anybody who has ever driven on the Boston freeways during the morning rush can see how that works. I-93’s running at capacity, some bozo drops a soda can out the window, and hey-presto, traffic jams solid all the way south to New Bedford.

Sara runs the LII’s crew of engineers. Right now, she is talking to Dan and to Wayne Weibel, the LII’s Drupal developer. They’re looking at the output from WebPageTest.org, a free service that gives a lot of web-performance diagnostics (see below). A couple of things are obvious. The server isn’t clearing connections fast enough. They try a couple of quick alterations to the server configuration. The first shoots the load numbers through the roof, and locks up the server. Oops. Definitely not an improvement. A second is successful. Now the server’s clearing connections fast enough to not bog down completely, so the site’s visitors are getting what they want. But it’s still slow. Time to go under the hood.

A single web page at the LII is made up of a lot of pieces. The home page has 65 separate components. Around 20 of them come from the LII, and the remainder are things like that little Facebook logo with the number of “likes” on the page, which has to be fetched from Facebook every time a visitor shows up. Each LII component can involve multiple database queries that look up text, provide additional links to related information, and so on. Every component comes with a “set-up charge” — the cost in time of setting up a connection from the user’s browser so that the component can be retrieved. There are a lot of moving parts. The LII uses a variety of strategies that reduce the need to regenerate pages, either holding preassembled pages in a cache to be served up directly, or telling the user’s browser that it’s OK to hang on to pieces that get used repetitively and not reload them. Either approach cuts down on the work the server has to do. Right now, it’s not enough.

Over the next three days, Sara, Wayne, and Dan will spend a lot of time staring at complex “waterfall” diagrams that give a timeline for the loading of each component that goes into the page. The waterfall also shows them what’s waiting for what; some components need others before they can load. They’ll identify bottlenecks and either eliminate them or find a way to make the component smaller so it takes less time to load. The server will be tweaked so that it doesn’t clog up as quickly. Components will be combined so that they can be loaded from a single file, reducing the number of data connections needed and the setup time involved. They’ll get the average page loading time from 7 seconds down to under 4, even during the afternoon rush. Three seconds doesn’t sound like much, but for users, it’s an eternity. During the rush, it’s critical. An average load time of 7 seconds quickly ramps up to 16 seconds or more, because, well, the slow get slower. An average load time of 4 seconds is stable at 4 seconds. The crew think they can get it down to 3. The Director wants 2. The LII audience wants something instantaneous, or even better, telepathy. Sara and the crew will turn this crisis into an opportunity. Suddenly, everybody’s got a lot of good ideas about how to make things even faster and they’re starting to compete with the clock. The team is drag-racing now.

There’s more to all this than speed. Because the server is now on the right side of the loading curve, it can serve around 150 more simultaneous users during rush hour, when there are typically around 1350 simultaneous visitors on the site. That’s an 11% increase. There are also implications for our donors. Throwing hardware at a problem like this can be expensive. None of the changes they’ve made involved upgrading hardware or buying more computing cycles. That’s a good thing; the next biggest server ( a “double extra large”, in cloud-computing-speak) would cost about twice what we’re paying now.

So, more people in the LII audience getting more legal information twice as fast at no increase in cost. What’s not to like about that?

Supreme Court Oral Arguments week of February 25

val_kimber — Fri, 22 Feb 2013 13:09:14 +0000

The Supreme Court hears 6 cases next week. Topics include: Antitrust and the Federal Arbitration Act, DNA and the Fourth Amendment, AEDPA and Habeas Corpus, Federal Sentencing Guidelines, the Voting Rights Act, the Death Penalty and ineffective assistance of counsel.

Monday, February 25, 2013

11-10189 TREVINO, CARLOS v. THALER, DIR., TX DCJ
12-126 McQUIGGIN, WARDEN v. PERKINS, FLOYD

Tuesday, February 26, 2013

12-207 MARYLAND v. KING, ALONZO J.
12-62 PEUGH, MARVIN v. UNITED STATES

Wednesday, February 27, 2013

Supreme Court oral arguments for week of Feb 19

val_kimber — Fri, 15 Feb 2013 13:33:53 +0000

The week of February 19 the Supreme Court hears 4 arguments. Topics include: the Commerce Clause, the Virginia Freedom of Information Act, Federal Tort Claims Act, Prisoners’ Rights, Sovereign Immunity, Foreign Tax Credit, Income Tax, Internal Revenue Code, First Sale Doctrine, Patent, and Patent Infringement.

Tuesday, February 19, 2013

11-10362 MILLBROOK, KIM v.UNITED STATES
11-796 BOWMAN, VERNON H. v.MONSANTO CO., ET AL.

Wednesday, February 20, 2013

12-17 McBURNEY, MARK J., ET AL. v.YOUNG, NATHANIEL L., ET AL.
12-43 PPL CORPORATION v.CIR

Supreme Court oral arguments for week of January 14

val_kimber — Fri, 11 Jan 2013 14:43:25 +0000

Next week the Supreme Court hears arguments including firearms, sentencing and the Sixth Amendment. Cases also being discussed are the Communications Act, the Medicaid Act, probable cause and search and seizure.

Monday, January 14, 2013

11-9335 ALLEYNE, ALLEN R. v.UNITED STATES

11-9953 BOYER, JONATHAN E. v.LOUISIANA

Tuesday, January 15, 2013

11-1351 LEVIN, STEVEN A. v.UNITED STATES, ET AL.

11-1447 KOONTZ, COY A. v.ST. JOHNS RIVER WATER MGMT.

Wednesday, January 16, 2013

11-1118 GUNN, JERRY W., ET AL. v.MINTON, VERNON F.

11-1545 ARLINGTON, TX, ET AL. v.FCC, ET AL.

11-1547 CABLE, TELECOMMUNICATIONS & TECH v.FCC, ET AL.

Supreme Court oral arguments for week of January 7

val_kimber — Fri, 04 Jan 2013 14:15:40 +0000

Next week the Supreme Court hears arguments involving the Armed Career Criminal Act, the Discovery Rule, the Driver’s Privacy Protection Act, and the Class Action Fairness Act of 2005.

Monday, January 7, 2013