Web Operations

Surviving the Weekend

We decided it was best to leave this in place through the Christmas weekend. Many people were on vacation, and we would not survive another hit like that without the caching proxy. It was a good thing we decided this, because on the 26^th, the traffic came back from Yahoo!, this time even stronger (see Figure 9-2).

Figure 9-2. Traffic spikes, this time handled well

Not only did Yahoo! put the article back on its front page, but also our presence on Yahoo! made searches for the word dealnews break Yahoo!'s top 10 trending search terms. So, not only did we have traffic from the article, but also we now had traffic from people wondering what dealnews was and clicking on it from Yahoo!'s front page. All of this created a very long tail of traffic that day. Several members of the IT staff had taken that day as a vacation day, and although we knew about it, we did not have to do any work to keep the site up and running. I did not know about this spike until it had been happening for a couple of hours.

The only close call we had during this traffic rush concerned bandwidth. The connection we had from our datacenter was capable of bursting only up to 100 Mbit/s. During this event, we reached more than 80 Mbit/s. It was clear this was not going to be OK for another year.