Web Devout was dugg
Friday, August 11th, 2006
Yesterday, this site’s standards support resource appeared on the front page of digg, an extremely popular social bookmarking site, and the resulting impact made Web Devout inaccessible to many visitors for several hours. At the peak, the server managed to serve over 7000 requests to a total of nearly 1500 unique visitors in one hour. That doesn’t include the many people whose connections timed out during the wait. The digg post has achieved almost 2000 diggs (bookmark actions, which are treated as votes in favor of the page). More initial statistics are available.
The digg post was marked by some users as “inaccurate”, possibly due to a recent blog post by Chris Wilson, group program manager on the Internet Explorer platform development team, where he criticised some aspects of the structure of the standards support resource and the resulting percentage values. I presented my counterarguments in the comments of that post and I recommend that people take a read.
Shortly after Web Devout appeared on the digg front page, I quickly set up a server-side caching system to reduce the server impact and hopefully make the site available to more people. The site is now functional again and the caching system will remain up and running.