By the way, if you're able to get a small mention on BBC Click, we'd highly recommend it. We've seen some great triffic and feedback since our mention.
Then we'd do it all again, live, for the West Coast airing of the episode, the same night.
Season finale episodes brought roughly a bajillion people to our site simultaneously, because everyone wanted to "participate" in telling the world which contestant they wanted to win the season.
Thank God for Akamai...
This was about five years ago, so the set-up is a little more robust now. For example, they now have a CMS to manage web content, whereas we used to code and manage all our assets by hand. And back then they were too stingy to buy an extra server to automate a lot of the processes, so I actually had to stay late every week to literally "push the button" to make things go live in sync with the on-air broadcasts. All kinds of crazy stuff, on a shoestring budget.
But yeah, if you're talking about code stuff alone, we only had two actual coders/devs, me and another girl. Fun times!
1) For monitoring applications like Chartbeat, IIRC they count a user as concurrent if they are on the site anytime within the past 30 seconds. 2) I've seen real-time monitoring systems count a concurrent user as any visitor in the last 5 seconds. 3) Lastly, the only real raw numbers that I've seen are the traffic hits through an F5 load balancer to a set of backend servers, and that is the only number that will give you an unbiased # hits per second in real-time. Unfortunately, this amounts to requests (HTML) to the server and may not be a 1:1 ratio with users.
So in terms of what I've seen, it depends on the type of calls and the application. For the EA forums (forums.ea.com) which I was in charge of up until March 2013...
For #1, forums would regularly reach 15,000 on the launch of a new game. We would sustain that for ~12 hours [1]. On just an average normal non-event day, it pushes 3000 concurrents. For #2, I've seen something north of 3000 for EA forums. For #3, the F5 would report peaks of 200 requests per second.
When I built the Campus Wide Login (http://www.cwl.ubc.ca) SSO auth system for UBC about 11 years ago (still in use today) we would have almost 50-75% of the full campus using it at once, which is about 30k concurrents (unfortunately I didn't have access to the numbers over the F5 LB). However, most of these calls were for the HTML which then went through an SOA (XML-RPC, ugh) architecture, so I'm sure the req/s was much higher on the XML-RPC backend.
[1] this is a feat in itself because most of the forum data is not cached because the business wanted the data in real-time, so the read databases would receive a lot of traffic when the web servers spiked.
Edit: formatting
We were on BBC Radio 2 Drive Time the Friday before (web address mentioned this time) and we got about the same.
Shopify did an amazing job dealing with the traffic spike.
Good job getting on Click, that's awesome. We got lucky with the bad weather in March making our launch a relevant story.
For those interested in how an ecommerce site stacks up with traffic spikes, Shopify did a great job, the weak link was paypal. We had a good number of (potential) customers email to us to say that paypal locked up during payment, we were taking several orders a minute for a while there but still annoying that some were dropped.
One of our mailing lists also grew by 1200 names in 3 hours and Mail Chimp coped fine.
Before the MakeUseOf article I'd get 3 to 10 hits a day with 1 visitor at a time. After the first MakeUseOf article it went to about 20 at a time for about a day. After that the site has been picked up by other blogs (some of them review it multiple times on different days) so the traffic has increased about 100% from pre-review levels and has been holding steady at about 100-ish visitors a day and 3 users at a time normally. Note that there are obviously periods in the day where its 0 because you can't have 100 uniques and 3 visitors on site at the same time all day. The math doesn't add up. I'm just talking about what I see whenever I check my analytics which is pretty often during the weekdays.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/achshar-player/fdd...
It was at the top of Hacker News and /r/programming for a little bit. It stayed pretty constant at that level for about half the day.
My first post to get over 120 users at a time was http://maxburstein.com/blog/creating-resume-using-latex/
It was at the top of /r/programming with over 1000 points so it was also getting some traffic from /r/all.
The hourly graph from Google analytics looks like this: https://www.diigo.com/item/p/podoedezbpdaaccrczbabdsacq/05eb...
Thats on one site out of 8 that share the same cluster/platform, so the net total would have been in the mid 200K's.
edit: props to chartbeat for even being able to track such things, I'm just scaling reads, they're scaling writes.
Micro-Site: We set up an experimental just-for-fun site with a bit of a viral edge and got 1.1 million visitors in one day, mostly from China - it apparently front-paged on a few major sites over there.
Sat at a pretty constant 250 online visitors for hours. Pretty sure the brief peak must have been close to 700 as well.
Fortunately Webpop is built to handle that kind of traffic, so we never had to worry about the site crumbling under the load...
Though, now I'm remembering that the post was also on /r/webdev and /r/web_design, so that skews things a bit.
Luckily, I had recently converted the site from WordPress to Jekyll and was hosting it on Github pages, so I didn't worry too much about the load.
http://statspotting.com/pgs-hidden-message-in-hackernews-alg...
Also you have to precise. I was removing a real visitor after 30 seconds. Some websites I know are doing it after 2 minutes... It changes your numbers a lot.
my site: http://www.flipmeme.com
Around 2500 on www.kayako.com after a particular newsletter went out to our customers.
