Farked/Boing Boing'd tonight
 

The Pakistan garbage area/ferris wheel is proving to be the most popular IotD ever. It was Boing Boing'd today and then linked directly on the Fark homepage at about 10:30 pm, which is why we died about an hour and a half ago. We would have easily set a new high number of users but the system was so busy it wound up just blinking for a while.

No shit !!!
Coool !!!

Ah so, no wonder I couldn't hook up earlier. I saw 754 (9 members, 745 guests) about 1:30am. I thought they all came to see me. :(

Good God! Fark has over 10k hits on the link at the top of the page.

How much more do they spend on bandwidth than you do, UT? Not that I'm callilng you cheap, on the contrary...I have a whole new respect for the scale of things online.

Fark is an interesting case because almost everything they serve is text, not images. So it doesn't take much bandwidth at all. Their real secret is writing everything in Perl and optimizing the crap out of it, I think.

I'm a little disappointed in how quickly this place choked. Just last week I was looking into performance on the system. I spent some time reducing the memory footprint of Apache by removing pieces we don't use. Didn't help... and I'm not sure why! With a Pentium 2500 and not running anything graphical, this place should fly a little faster than it does now. It may be that vBulletin's new features are really demanding on the server for some reason.

Holy shit! The albino peacock (3/31) IotD just hit the FARK main page at 2:56 EDT this morning (with proper attribution to cellar.org this time).

This could get interesting.

The Pakistan garbage area/ferris wheel is also linked at Attu sees all.

Damn. New record users every couple minutes. Imagine if it were a weekday.

I'm glad for UT and the Cellar's rise to fame, but it sure makes it hard for us regulars to do much on the board - especially if you just have stupid old dial-up like I do.

What is UT? Is it the reason I keep getting bumped off? I don't understand this coded language. :headshake

Ah, I see... That's why...

Right sorry all, this is just about the modern equivalent of a denial of service attack. Double-farked, Boing'd, Attu'd, all at the same time... the whole thing would be permanently down except that I'm basically stopping and starting the web server every 30 minutes to untangle it.

So, if the cellar continues to rise to this level of fame, will you have to buy more band width to deal with it, UT? How does that work?

We have plenty of bandwidth, it's just the thousands of connections to the web server and database and it's only a problem for today, when the links are really flying in. If I'd have known, I would have optimized for it and we probably would have been ok. There are tricks one can do to improve speed.

Yes, but look on the bright side. As an established user you can hire yourself out as a "Cellar consultant":D.

If the Cellar ever closes to new users, maybe we can sell our Cellar accounts like seats on the stock exchange.:yelgreedy

There is no better way to make money in the US than to tell people they can't have something.