Who said the “old media” is dead and the “new media” has already won the race?! By no means! A PR stunt at A Current Affair (a TV programme in Australia, but don’t ask me about it as I don’t even have a TV at home) this evening featured a few shopping related websites, which sent a huge surge of traffic to one of my sites.
Check out this graph taken from Cacti:
Yeah. That was the expression I had when I checked the server health after dinner tonight (what better can you do for relaxation? :) Initially I thought some scrapper is hammering my websites, and I had such incident a few weeks ago when someone behind Comcast from Seattle trying to download every page of my website. That was easy to spot and easy to fix.
However in this evening’s instance, traffic are coming from everywhere. Scanning through the web server access log found that they are all searching for a specific phrase, which one of my page came out at #2 in Google Australia’s SERP, whereas the actual site is at #1. But then why people bothered to check my short review instead of going to the actual site?
It turns out, after they have been featured at A Current Affair this evening, their Drupal-powered website could not cope with the traffic spike, and pretty much instantly their hosting company, Jumba, turned the switch off and suspended their shared hosting account. Ouch. They finally got onto the national television, but they weren’t prepared — however thanks for sending traffic my way :) Over the 2 hours span there were around 4,000-5,000 visitors where I normally get only 200.
How’s my server coping? Not an issue — the 15 minute load average jumped from 0.1 to 0.2 and that was about it. Not that I am anticipating any traffic spike (hey, A Current Affair people — you know where to contact me :) but it is always a good idea to know much traffic your current set up can handle, and make sure you leave enough rooms for potential Digg, Slashdot, StumbleUpon or featured on Television.
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I read a great article in a similar fashion about a Hot or Not type site called FaceStat recently when they got featured on the front page of Yahoo!.
Normally their site was averaging less than 50,000 impressions a day and then that suddenly jumped to a number over 600,000.
Needless to say, they were super happy that they could scale their site up in a hurry as they were using SliceHost.
I guess the differences is, the FaceStat guys are experienced developers knowing where to look for bottlenecks, and hosted on SliceHost which they can pretty much instantly deploy new instances to take care of the load…
A lot of websites, even those featured on national television, don’t have this kind of privilege.
Yeah one of the guys at Facestat blogged about there issue here:
http://www.lukasbiewald.com/?p=153
I think big sites like Yahoo and national TV shows like ACA need to at least give the people they are going to list/link to/advertise a heads up to advise “Hey you might get smashed with traffic soon”.
It seems like these shows just pick random sites and list them without even consulting or speaking to the site owners.
Hmm. Maybe they do? They actually interviewed two out of 5 sites they featured so I guess there might be a warning somwhere that they might be featured on ACA?
Actually I just read their forums (the main site is still displaying offline message, but they haven’t removed the forums yet), and it appears that they know in advance exactly what date the program will be aired. Maybe just in experienced dealing with this kind of load…
Dealing with intermittent (or even one-off) traffic spikes is actually a really interesting topic - I think it would make a great post. Another topic that might be worth writing about is how to keep an eye on your users - e.g., analytics. (One of the things that bugs me as a programmer is that I don’t have a good feel for how the users are interacting with my stuff - ideally I’d be able to get a real-time sense of what’s going on, but so far I’ve not found any easy way to make that happen.)
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