smorg

(Bonus points if you get the title reference)

Today one of my sites, Techpedia.org, got it’s digital ass kicked.

Digg.com is a very popular technology news site. Users submit stories of interest (not original content in most cases), and other Digg visitors vote them up/down based on the cool/usability/techy value of the site.

An article I posted on Techpedia a few days ago about Apples new OS, codenamed ‘Leopard’, contained some of the first publicly available screenshots of the new OS. Being at WWDC recently, i was one of the lucky 6000 people in the WORLD to get their hands on a preview release. I, of course, being a huuuuge geek immediately installed it and posted the screenshots and some commentary on my site.

Well, after a couple of days with a few hundred visitors, the Digg effect really kicked in, and yesterday and today we had over 50,000 visitors.

That’s not page views, my friends…that’s unique IP addresses. Yeah. More people than you, I and our familes combined know.
:)

So the server itself got its butt kicked. MySQL failed bigtime, as all of the screenshots were stored in the DB. Not the pics themselves, just the metadata for them and the filesystem references. But poor php, wordpress and mysql as a team were beaten down badly. OH, so badly.

At this point, I’ve created a simple html page with the images, and redirected all ‘real’ traffic to that page, to ease the load on the server and to alleviate the downtime for the other sites on this server. Sorry guys.

Anyway, it’s kind of a back handed compliment…I’m thrilled that my content is so popular, but at the same time, a little disappointed that only 2 of 5 visitors got to see it in context.

Ah well. That’s life on the internet, I guess.

Oh, if you want to see the content mentioned, check out: www.techpedia.org …if it’s up.
;)