Two weeks ago, I published an article about the Redneck Jokes and More iPhone app legal drama. It was a story that I thought should be told and I did my best to tell it. Good news, is that it was picked up on Hacker News’s front page during the lunch hour. I just posted the link on a whim. Here is what Google Analytics looks like a few days after wards….
When the story hit the front page, I was receiving such an amount of requests for this article I couldn’t even keep the server going. It is running as a virtual machine and at many points the server peaked above 80.00 on it’s load average. It was so high that the host server shut it down countless times. This comes to hard lesson #1… CACHE! Now this site (not surprisingly) is ran using WordPress. Luckily that means there are tons of great caching plugins. Use one! I had reminded myself about three times to do that in September and October, but found excuses not to. It’s simple and it saved my site.
Without going into too much details (as most of my readers already get the caching principle), but using one of the caching plugins (in my case WP-Cache) the blog posts, pages, etc are cached as HTML pages. This is good because then WordPress doesn’t have to contact the database and reassemble the post/page/etc every time a user accesses that link. In my case I was seeing 100s req/s at one point and the tiny server just couldn’t handle it. Once caching was put in, it was just apache doing the work and the server barely got a work out.
The previous graph sure makes it look like I get no visitors huh? Luckily that isn’t the case, I generally see between 30 and 100 visitors daily; mostly due to the lack of updated content. Take a look at the following graphic. It is a report for just the article which got all the attention for about a week after it was published. November 2nd is the day which it was on Hacker News’ front page. Just eyeballing the site, I noticed that most of the hits happened from 12noon to 3pm (central).
My analysis: get posted during lunch hour on a monday. This is when all the people at their jobs are surfing the net looking for things to read about. 
Nothing break through about that, just proof postive that’s how it worked.
I would also like to say hi to my additional 25 RSS subscribers. You guys are great! I will work hard keep you from unsubscribing. 
Related posts:
