Published by KermMartian 17 years, 9 months ago (2006-12-17T13:48:39+00:00) | Discuss this article

This weekend was the first time Cemetech has come under heavy load from the so-called Digg Effect (similar to its cousin, the Slashdot Effect). While we previously felt some slight load from Portable GIMP - Put The GIMP on a usb thumb drive, it only reached 304 diggs, not the 700+ the Pokemon Purple article has jumped to. The previous record of 42 simultaneous users, set when Portable GIMP was announced, has been completely shattered by 380 people checking out Pokemon Purple at the same time. The real story of the whole debacle can be told with bandwidth numbers. Before December 15th, Cemetech was averaging between 115 MB and 125 MB transferred per day. Once the digg effect kicked in, Cemetech was bombarded with 3,52 GB of outbound transfers in the 24 hours of December 15th, with another 796.87 MB transferred on the 16th of December. If the Digg Effect had been spread out over all of December 15th, the average load would have been a sustained 350 kbps outbound from the server; since the effect didn't kick in under the middle of the day, load probably peaked somewhere well over 1 mbps. We at Cemetech hope digg gives us the opportunity for further load-testing in the near future.

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