Yesterday was quite a traffic day here on yafla.

After seeing a continuous low-level amount of interest coming from Reddit.com, continuing from Wednesday afternoon, mid-yesterday I happened to check the stats to find it reporting ~3500 simultaneous visitors (of course they weren't actually simultaneous GETs, but rather were simultaneous from the perspective of sessions). Initially I presumed that it was a software defect, but I quickly discovered it was real, and was due to the domain name entry appearing on Digg's front page. Along with a number of other great sites linking in, later in the day add to that some Slashdotting as another entry was apparently referenced in a story there.

Many impressive sites feeding in thousands upon thousands of visitors an hour. All told, from when the interest really kicked off early in the afternoon some 36,000 visitors came through by midnight, browsing well over 100,000 pages. This high level of traffic has continued through today.

I want to give my host a breather (the excellent ISQSolutions), so I'm going to hold off publishing the follow-up to the domain name entry (where I include stats such as dictionary values, phrase variations, etc) for a day or two to let the traffic settle a bit.

Through it all the site never failed to serve up pages (during the height of it the server continued to serve pages virtually instantly), courtesy of the fact that I publish these pages rendered into static form. Not only does this avoid the unnecessary overhead of script interpreting or database access, it also allows IIS 6 to kernel-cache the pages, allowing it to serve cached pages without even leaving kernel mode.

I should also say that Digg's influence is vastly greater than I postulated previously. I've had several pages as the primary focus of Slashdot stories before, and they didn't yield the simultaneous influx that a Digg front page did.