Tag Archives: slashdot

No “Fail Whale” for Fonolo After Slashdot

Last Thursday (June 23rd), my company Fonolo was featured on Slashdot, which then it made it’s way to Boing Boing, and a handful of other sites.

Now, this was great news for us, as it generated a TON of traffic into our sites, but I was also understandably concerned about what this extra traffic coming into our system was going to do. I’ve heard (and seen) dozens of horror stories about sites featured on Slashdot, who’s servers simply ended up melting from the extra traffic. Having a full out “fail whale” situation, would simply be an embarrassment to us; and I would consider it a personal failure, given that I have been the chief architect of the Fonolo system.

But despite traffic peaking at ~44MB sustained, our system handled it with tons of room to spare- no interruptions, no failures, no downtime.

and lighttpd handled all the web traffic like a champ.