Biznik gets Dugg
Notice that Biznik.com was down for awhile this morning? Here’s why…
On May 31st, Shae Allen made a dandy post to Biz Talk: If Architects Had To Work Like Web Designers. It was a brilliantly ironic post poking fun at nightmare clients, which began: “Dear Mr. Architect: Please design and build me a house. I am not quite sure of what I need, so you should use your discretion. My house should have somewhere between two and forty-five bedrooms. Just make sure the plans are such that the bedrooms can be easily added or deleted…”
Shae’s post got about a dozen appreciative comments in BizTalk, far more than the average post. Then it just sat there, ignored…until this morning. Around 9 am, somebody on the popular website Digg.com discovered it, and Dugg it. Within minutes, Biznik.com was getting like 200 requests per second as other Digg members started digging it too, pushing the story higher and higher until it was the top story in the Programming category. Then, our server gave up on trying to handle the requests, and John and I scrambled to cache the page so that we could get the site back up.
It’s back up and running now, and the site is still getting about 45 requests per second. The story has been Dugg more than 820 times at last count, but we seem to have weathered the storm. Congratulations Shae for the most popular BizTalk post ever!
(PS - you won’t be able to post any comments on her post until we remove the cache on that particular page - which we’ll do once the traffic settles down).
June 22nd, 2007 at 3:07 pm
Biznik members (logged in) can now view the original thread and post comments to it. But general public is still seeing the cached page, which now has 1064 Diggs!
June 23rd, 2007 at 7:11 am
Update: we had to put the story back into cache late yesterday because it briefly made it out onto the Digg home page, causing another surge of traffic (which means any comments you post to that BizTalk post won’t be visible until we remove the cache). As of Saturday morning, it’s still #1 on http://www.digg.com/programming, and the story has received 1503 Diggs. Yesterday, Biznik received 28,000 visits from 23,000 unique ip addresses.
June 23rd, 2007 at 6:36 pm
Holy….. crap.
June 23rd, 2007 at 7:24 pm
One wonders why a 5 1/2 year old blog post (http://www.scottmanning.com/archives/000455.php) would attract so much attention from the Digg community.
June 24th, 2007 at 8:51 am
Comical stories often get a lot of popular diggs on Digg. I remember reading it when when it was first posted.
From a forum standpoint (I don’t know if you can do this, since you use custom RubyonRails), but you should be able to auto-cache settings on a thread to detect massive traffic spikes to a post. Many other communities suffer the same problem when the a dugg (or scaped, or even twittered)
June 27th, 2007 at 1:03 pm
And we keep getting that blank stare from folks when we mention that Biznik has great potential.
DD
July 1st, 2007 at 3:53 pm
We found a way to handle all the increased traffic next time this happens by using an awesome site that mirros your data - so we’ll be prepared next time.