Server meltdown
My post on building a better soda can stove was a test run for my new blog engine. For some reason, it got a lot more attention than I was hoping for. In turn, it rose to the front page on Reddit, Del.icio.us, Digg, and Makezine. Oh my...
What happened exactly? I'm not sure but I will tell my side of the story. I run this website on my home DSL. I have an upload cap of 80 kb/s. This is not great but until now it was plenty enough. Once my new blogging engine was running, I did a few test with Apache bench to see how responsive it was. Everything was fine and it didn't require much CPU load to saturate my uplink. But it didn't feel right, this test was way too artificial. At 7h16, I submitted my howto to Reddit, just to see a real world traffic spike. I didn't expect much, maybe a few hundred hits before I was down voted into oblivion. Exactly seven seconds after hitting submit, I had my first visitor. Not bad, I thought. Then an other one, and an other one, and it kept pouring like that for 36 hours. As I write this, I have brief periods of sub-saturation for the first time.