Political Sites Scale Up For Election Traffic 68
miller60 writes "News sites and political blogs are expecting extraordinary traffic tonight as Americans track results of the Presidential election, and are scaling their infrastructure to meet the challenge. Yahoo anticipates its Election Night traffic may be three times the volume seen in 2004, when it had 80 million page views on Election Day and 142 million more visits the following day. Hosting companies say customers have been ordering extra servers and load balancing services, while content delivery networks are also expecting a busy night. Will traffic approach record levels? Akamai's Net Usage Index, which tracks traffic to its customer news sites, is one metric to watch."
Other neat metrics (Score:4, Informative)
Those metrics in easier to understand forms (Score:3, Informative)
142 million visits in one day is about ~1640 visits per second. However, traffic isn't distributed evenly - typically peak is twice that of average. So they need to be provisioned to handle ~3287 visits per second.
They'll also want some headroom to ensure they can still serve in case of hardware failure, so let's imagine they provision for 4000 visits/second.
The Yahoo homepage, at least for me, triggers about 32 file loads on a cold cache, so that's a peak hits per second of about 128,000.
For comparison, Akamai globally peaks at about 6.5 million hits/second [akamai.com].