While I’m on the topic of Slashdotting, I had a conversation with Clif the other day about what it takes to scale up sites to handle the onslaught of traffic generated by people looking for web coverage of Election Night. It’s one of those nasty scalability problems where if you get it wrong, you’re utterly screwed and don’t get a do-over or a few hours to fix it. If you’re in the business of selling eyeballs and your site goes dark during the Big Game, you’re pretty much hosed. And broke.
Data Center Knowledge has a neat article about what goes on behind the scenes to ramp up for an event of this magnitude.
Dude. I clicked through to the Akamai site and looked at the graph. 8.5 million visits per minute to sites supported by Akamai on election night at 11:00 pm Eastern. Before that, most of the peaks have been around sporting events. Cool!