Popularity Comes With A Price
Here is are several combined entries that summarize how our day has gone:
12:30 am (Japan time) - Our server is shut off again, so many images from our web site are missing. It would seem that another popular tech web site in Japan posted another story about us.
http://www.slashdot.jp/
The traffic caused the same trouble as before (there were some 2,000 hits within 5 minutes). We are in the process of tracking down the offending PHP file, and may have to remove it completely to avoid more trouble. We are still at a loss for why a simple script that rotates small images would hog all the CPU time of a server. Our provider has not offered any suggestions, so all we can do is delete the file and wait for them to turn our site back on. Wish us luck, as we are in the middle of sorting this out...
2:30 am (Japan time) At around 8 pm, our site had only 10% of the traffic from the previous day. so we quit monitoring it and went on to other things. Sometime around 10 pm, the traffic began to spike again. There were 10,000 hits from 3,000 people in two hours. We did not catch the crisis until 12:30 am. In the two hours since, the traffic has remained paced the same.
Our provider will be turning our web site back on, so all our remotely hosted images should be returning soon. We decided to remove 2 of our php files in the sidebar. They were so useful, as the rotated new images every time a page was loaded. But clearly, we do not want to wake up a third time and find our web site shut down and account suspended.
So we are working on a graphic solution to fix this design gap, while monitoring the crazy traffic flow. From what we can tell, the links are spreading out into more bbs forums, where people are chatting about our products instead of just giving a link to check them out.
8:00 pm (Japan time) In the 20 hours since this second wave of traffic began, we have had nearly 80,000 hits from 26,000 unique visitors. That trashes Thursday's high of 31,320 hits from 9,628 visitors. Finally, one sale has been made - but not an inspiring ratio. We usually do far better in sales with 1/10th of 1% of this traffic burst.
At the moment, we just want to lick our wounds from being so popular.
12:30 am (Japan time) - Our server is shut off again, so many images from our web site are missing. It would seem that another popular tech web site in Japan posted another story about us.
http://www.slashdot.jp/
The traffic caused the same trouble as before (there were some 2,000 hits within 5 minutes). We are in the process of tracking down the offending PHP file, and may have to remove it completely to avoid more trouble. We are still at a loss for why a simple script that rotates small images would hog all the CPU time of a server. Our provider has not offered any suggestions, so all we can do is delete the file and wait for them to turn our site back on. Wish us luck, as we are in the middle of sorting this out...
2:30 am (Japan time) At around 8 pm, our site had only 10% of the traffic from the previous day. so we quit monitoring it and went on to other things. Sometime around 10 pm, the traffic began to spike again. There were 10,000 hits from 3,000 people in two hours. We did not catch the crisis until 12:30 am. In the two hours since, the traffic has remained paced the same.
Our provider will be turning our web site back on, so all our remotely hosted images should be returning soon. We decided to remove 2 of our php files in the sidebar. They were so useful, as the rotated new images every time a page was loaded. But clearly, we do not want to wake up a third time and find our web site shut down and account suspended.
So we are working on a graphic solution to fix this design gap, while monitoring the crazy traffic flow. From what we can tell, the links are spreading out into more bbs forums, where people are chatting about our products instead of just giving a link to check them out.
8:00 pm (Japan time) In the 20 hours since this second wave of traffic began, we have had nearly 80,000 hits from 26,000 unique visitors. That trashes Thursday's high of 31,320 hits from 9,628 visitors. Finally, one sale has been made - but not an inspiring ratio. We usually do far better in sales with 1/10th of 1% of this traffic burst.
At the moment, we just want to lick our wounds from being so popular.
posted by Han Translation at 8:15 PM
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