Some of you have probably noticed that MMP was a little screwed up this week. Let me explain what happened...

On Tuesday, MMP was featured on the homepage on digg.com, the largest technology website on the planet for the battery explosion story related to my MacBook Pro. Digg is a social driven user content website, that means that all the news is submitted by users (like me) and viewed by other users. When someone finds something that perks their interest they "digg" the article. The more diggs you have the higher your rank goes. When your rank is high you can be promoted to their homepage by the digg overlords and then you essentially become the hottest thing on the internet for 36 hours. Having your site on the digg homepage is the nerd's equivalent of going to the super bowl.

So, I had 36 hours of web-server hell this week. The server that I pay for to host MMP was getting thousands of web requests per minute and could not handle the load. The result, was insanely slow server performance and the need to off load some of the processing to 3rd party servers. So, I nerded out and offloaded MMP content to other servers on the internet to keep the site alive. Much to my chagrin, I started to max out the 3rd party servers because of the insane traffic I was receiving. Due to this traffic bonanza I had to shut MMP down and forward everyone off to a mirror of my site that was created thanks to the folks at DiggMirror. This meant that I could no longer make live posts and allow content to hit the homepage however it kept MMP limping along and viewers could see the article that was on Digg.

So, now that the heat has died down a little I've decided to ditch the mirror and bring the site back. You may notice a little drop in server response and some articles are missing from the homepage but we're back and have tons of content for you this week.

Random Statistics From The Digging

1. I overloaded my analytics product that tracks my web properties. It could not keep up with the traffic requests.
2. I served out over 300 gigabytes of data in less than 12 hours on Tuesday night.
3. The 3rd party servers I was using to host the images began to buckle from the traffic on Wednesday morning.
4. The number of stories presented on the MMP homepage was taken from 14 down to 7 in order to decrease pageload size.
5. My story on Digg ended up getting around 800 diggs and around 80 comments.
   

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 01, 2006 at Sunday, October 01, 2006. You can skip to the end and leave a response.