Some comments on Sunday about this site performing well induced me to have a look at the traffic over the last week. I was extremely surprised at how much load the system can now take without stalling. From the WordPress blog stats, It turns out that the traffic for the week was 34.6% higher in page views compared to the week before. It was a staggering 61.9% higher than it was two weeks before. It makes me more confident about running the site at a technical level towards the 2011 (or earlier) election.
I’d love to take credit for this (and I will in part). However the reason people read the site is largely because of the content, both from our posters and our knowledgeable and informed commentators*. This is a completely voluntary site run on a very loose cooperative arrangement – it just shows what kind of talent is there to be tapped from the grass-roots. A special mention for Julie Fairey from The Hand Mirror for her election evening coverage who kept everyone coming back for more. Despite being offline for comments for 19 hours, it is still in our top ten days for traffic.
However that is just the visible portion of the site. We’re reliant on a number of technical supports.
Webfarm also deserves a strong mention. Their systems have been utterly reliable since I moved the site there in Feburary. Currently the site runs on virtual private server with 512MB of RAM running Fedora Linux with unlimited local traffic costing $159+GST per month.
However, my biggest kudo’s has to go to the open source people at WordPress, Fedora project, K2 theme and the wordpress plugin authors without whom this system would have failed dramatically under the load. The site now runs without any code kludges apart from some css styles for the display. It is quite a different site from what was running last year and failing under load.
* Well almost all commentators – I specifically exclude the annoying, largely incoherent, and definitely anti-social trolls. To a man, they seem to mainly be act supporters** hyped on their badly self-assessed intelligence, in love with their own egos, and who take the credo of individualism to the point of being incapable of meaningful social interaction with others. It is the one area that I pity John Key in – he is going to have to deal with adult versions of these clowns. He also doesn’t have the “send to spam” button. However he has done well with an early ban.
** But not all act supporters are trolls
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