Traffic Spike
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. 