Last week on Monday the Google Chrome comic book arrived here via FedEx, talking about Google's new browser project. Here are some details on the server traffic explosion that followed.
Blogoscoped runs on a dedicated server but shares its space with a couple of other domains, like CoverBrowser.com. I also have a second server available for GamesfortheBrain.com and other projects. All in all, the server was getting very slow sometimes and was partly down, but it also could have been worse, and for times the server was doing OK, especially considering the frontpage link of delicious, Slashdot, Digg and Reddit all at the same time. Each Blogoscoped post is static, cached HTML with no database connections or PHP or so, this helps a lot.
When I showed the following Google Analytics stats to my friend he said – why is there a flat traffic line?
http://blogoscoped.com/files/chrome-stats.png
Well, it turns out the traffic wasn't dead before September 1st... it's just that Google Analytics scales the display and in order to display the peak, it makes it look as if there was nothing going on before!
From August 31 to September 5, there were 1,383,159 visits, and 4,853,156 page views. During that time frame, the post itself talking about Google Chrome received 723,191 page views. The first page of the comic book received 568,594 page views (the second page received 264,867 views, the third page 182,914...). I temporarily moved the comic book to the 2nd server, which confuses the stats a bit (and shows blogoscoped.com as top referrer, probably due to the iframe). The visits peaked on Tuesday at 705,161 across all of blogoscoped.com. Some of the top referrers:
Digg.com: 71,775
Reddit.com: 47,334
Slashdot.org: 58,328
Wikipedia: 26,093 (e.g. the Google Chrome article)
Google.com: 24,717 (e.g. people searching for [google chrome] and related terms)
Elpais.com 12,024
Techmeme: 9,812
Tgdaily: 8,805
Metafilter: 7,129
CNet: 5,809
Downloadsquad: 5,795
ZDNet: 4,974
Techcrunch: 4,038
ArsTechnica: 3,239
and so on...
I'm not sure, but I suppose that might have been the biggest traffic peak ever since Blogoscoped started out in 2003. Thanks to everyone who during the peak commented, linked, offered hosting help, feedback on server stability and more! |
WOW – that is a TON of traffic ... how many billions of bytes served? |
Philipp, this is awesome! :) |
Great! Thanks for sharing the info too. Very interesting.
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> Google.com: 24,717 (e.g. people searching for
> [google chrome] and related terms)
Correction: Above number was shown in the referrer list for Google.com, but it apparently filters out most search referrers. Instead, that number was stuff like Google Reader, iGoogle and more. The actual number for search traffic from Google from August 31 to September 5 was 286,005. The top 9 search keyphrases were all Chrome-related:
1. google chrome 138,747
2. chrome google 31,060
3. chrome 11,300
4. google browser 7,852
5. google chrome download 6,964
6. google browser chrome 4,126
7. google chrome comic 3,449
8. google chrome browser 3,288
9. google chrome screenshots 2,557 |
those are very big numbers, blogoscoped was digged, slashdoted, and [sites]-ed and you survived the wave well!
You did a great professional job here ;) |
applause applause applause
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That are very nice numbers Philipp! |
Wow, those are impressive numbers. Congrats on the huge amount of traffic and the fact your site stayed up. :) |
