traffic — it ain’t just a problem for the bay area
JohnSome of you may recall I was talking about a server shuffle here at Sticks of Fire — for the non-tech-savvy, that just meant we were moving to a new computer provided by the company that hosts the Sticks on the Internet. The good news is that got done. Not without interesting findings.
On September 26th (2 weeks back), I got contacted by someone with our hosting company. That might sound routine because I pride myself with that “administrator” name, and technical thing-a-ma-jigs, hoochiemabobs and whatchamacallits are what Administrators do. Talking to tech people is routine… Right?
That isn’t the case. Hosting companies never contact you. Never. Ever.
The technician told me that Tommy’s account was using a great deal of resources on the new server we were on. About half of them to be exact. On a standard computer, using half of the processing power isn’t a big deal. On a web server? That’s another story - these are mamoth computers to begin with with loads of processing power and tons of RAM (yeah, I know, I’m going into techno-babble again and I’m losing some of you in the process). It’s set up that way to host several web sites at once, not just one or two but maybe 15 or more and all the web traffic they bring in.
I looked at some statistics on our server and was shocked to see the following (WARNING: More technobabble):
Tuesday, September 26th –
Successful requests: 151,187
Average successful requests per day: 149,217
Successful requests for pages: 25,319
Average successful requests for pages per day: 24,988
Distinct files requested: 5,523
Distinct hosts served: 2,782
Data transferred: 3.77 gigabytes
Average data transferred per day: 3.72 gigabytes
In layman’s terms, we were using comparable amounts of bandwidth for a typical day as a major blog such at Daily Kos or Instapundit. What was causing this? Were we under attack from hackers? Did the world finally realize that the Sticks of Fire is the place to be?
Two words: Trenton Duckett
It wasn’t enough that Tommy had been linked to on Court Tv and other crime blogs, it was the discussion going on - and on and on and on — at Sticks of Fire that was driving up popularity. As of Wednesday. September 26th, the original Trenton Duckett post had just under 4000 comments (!!!) and was taking 2 or 3 refreshes of the page to load all the comments.
Instant overload.
Things are fine now but this explains in part why the new Duckett discussion posts are showing up every couple of days.
Tags: SoF - the site, tampa
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