Traffic Spike
January 14th, 2006 by Steve Pavlina
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If you found this site’s performance sluggish yesterday afternoon, a huge traffic spike was the culprit. My original post on polyphasic sleep was picked up by three social bookmarking sites simultaneously: digg.com, del.icio.us, and shoutwire.com. Consequently, StevePavlina.com received 142,408 page views yesterday, mostly within the span of a few hours. Normally the surge in traffic that comes from any one of these sites isn’t enough to cause a slowdown, but the triple-whammy of all three coming at the same time was enough to slow the web server to a crawl. The site was never completely offline, but response times were noticeably poor.
For you Unix geeks, the server load average for this site normally runs below 0.5. Right now it’s at 0.40. Yesterday afternoon it was at 52.
I just upgraded the web server a few months ago, so it may be time to upgrade again. Normal daily traffic is no problem, but I’d like to be able to handle such spikes without a slowdown.
On the bright side, my previous one-day Adsense earnings record was smashed yesterday… by over 60%. The previous record was broken on Jan 9, and the record before that was broken on Jan 2, so it just keeps hitting new highs. I’m amazed at how the Adsense earnings are continuing to increase by about 50% per month. How much longer can that rate of increase be maintained? This is the first month I’ve made triple digits from Adsense every single day, including weekends which are normally slower. I’d be surprised if I ever saw a two-digit day again.
Not bad for a Friday the 13th. 
January 16th, 2006 at 2:10 pm
Polyphasic Sleep
I got a note from an entrepreneur (Steven Livingstone) who is pondering polyphasic sleep and asked the question: I’ve just blogged something looking for advice from successful people on sleeping patterns as an entrepreneur. I haven’t read much (if an…
January 19th, 2006 at 6:27 pm
[...] For one, there’s the exceptional writing pointed out at ProBlogger. If we were to look at just length, yesterday’s article on Branching Out clocked at 1671 words – quite a bit more than the usual blog post. His writing is on topic – i.e. solely on personal development – and being a reader of 1 week, I’ve seen solid and clear articles – lent authencity by personal experiences. But not being an expert on the topic, I won’t elaborate on this. Steve also acknowledges that viral word of mouth brought substantial traffic. We already know that personal referals bring the most permanent traffic, especially for blogs in more personal niches. Success with social bookmarking is another. Most bloggers can only dream about experiencing a traffic spike as a result of being tagged by 3 top social bookmarking sites, i.e. digg, del.icio.us and shoutwire. [...]