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Forum: Off Topic
Thread (Discussion): A little humor at the expense of Bill Clinton / viral traffic
Message 122626
Posted by steve
on Dec 03, 2003 06:19 AM | Also by steve
| Gender: Male,
Age Bracket: 30 - 39,
State: Virginia,
Country: United States |
Doctored photo of Welcome to Arkansas sign.
For reference, I found the image on a discussion thread on Fark.com related to a link to SexCriminals.com posted a few hours ago. For those that don't know Fark.com, it's a very high traffic news listing site with half a million visitors per day. As of a few minutes ago, according to the page at the link above, over 22,000 had clicked the link from Fark.com to our sex offender registry directory in the 3 1/2 hours the link has been on their site.
It's actually pretty interesting how word spreads on high-traffic sites. A link was posted on ilovebacon.com this morning (a site I'd never heard of), within 2 hours it was posted on a private section of Fark, by afternoon over 4,000 had clicked the link from that site and by late evening SexCriminals.com was posted by people on at least a couple of dozen message boards and during its peak hour this evening SexCriminals.com had 20x normal traffic levels.
I had to put on my system admin hat for an hour or so to manage the load and tweak the server to handle it gracefully. It's always interesting...
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Message 122631 (In Reply to Message 122626)
Posted by orolan
on Dec 03, 2003 02:17 PM | Also by orolan
| Gender: Male,
Age Bracket: 30 - 39,
State: N/A,
Country: United States |
20x normal traffic? I imagine things did get a little hairy there for a little while. I'll have to check this fark.com site out.
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Message 122634 (In Reply to Message 122631)
Posted by steve
on Dec 03, 2003 03:46 PM | Also by steve
| Gender: Male,
Age Bracket: 30 - 39,
State: Virginia,
Country: United States |
> 20x normal traffic? I imagine things did get a little hairy there for a little while.
The server was really sluggish and page load times were very slow, but never crashed. Before I redesigned the site it crashed on several occasions since the coding and database backend were not very efficient and the average page was 3x the size in bytes that it is now.
By the way, it looks like more of the same today. The site is currently getting about 40 visitors per minute from Fark.com alone (another 20 or so per minute from other sources) and eyeballing the top referrers for the last 24 hours it looks like those who read the listing on Fark.com and another from ilovebacon.com (which probably led to the Fark.com listing) have posted links to SexCriminals.com on 100+ message boards since late morning yesterday, nearly all since late evening. When I get a chance I'm going to analyze how it proliferated and summarize the stats. With changes I made yesterday, the server can handle traffic several magnitudes higher and I can have it handle more by making some changes.
Considering the sex offender registries aren't "breaking news" it's amazing how fast word of a site that's been around 5 years can spread in one day. To give you an idea, through the first 9 hours of a typical day, visits and page views generally are roughly 20-25% of the day's total. Through the first 9 hours today, visits are already more than triple that for a typical *full* day and page views are more than double. Unfortunately, very few are venturing into the forums and it doesn't look like any have posted here, though a few thousand messages have been posted about the registries on the handful of message boards I checked.
> I'll have to check this fark.com site out.
According to the site's founder, more people access it daily for online news than all but 3 or 4 news sites worldwide. According to Fark's FAQ it received 210 million pageviews in 2002, which works out to about 575,000 per day. According to an interview the founder gave in February, it gets 500,000 visitors per day for 800,000 visits per day (meaning some are repeat visitors). Getting linked on Fark.com or Slashdot (a site I visit and participate in) regularly has the unintended of effect of crashing the linked sites due to the high volume traffic that results. A site crashed by those sites is said to have been "slashdotted" or "farked".
BTW, here's a thread on Slashdot about Maine's Sex Offender Registry which went online Monday. A link to the news archive here is buried in the thread. If anyone wants to get an idea of what several hundred people think about the registries (albeit skewed towards technical folks in the 18-35 age bracket) take a look at the Fark page mentioned in my first post and the slashdot thread above).
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Thread
122626, steve, Dec 03, 2003 06:19 AM
122631, orolan, Dec 03, 2003 02:17 PM
122634, steve, Dec 03, 2003 03:46 PM
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