In an ironic twist…

By Brian Boyko, Editor, Network Performance Daily
Network Performance Daily is my bread and butter, but I sometimes freelance at HardOCP.com (or “[H]ard|OCP“). I used to work there full time as an OEM computer evaluator – we’d be “reviewers” only it’s hard to call a 10,000 word article a “review.”
Today, one of the articles I wrote for HardOCP was published. This article, “30 days of Ubuntu Linux” was an in-depth, massive article complete with pictures and, at one point, video, of Ubuntu Linux from the perspective of the end-user. And, well, it’s a “hit.”
I’m very proud of it, obviously. The story was published at around 9:00 a.m. this morning, landed on Slashdot at 9:29 a.m. and on the front page of Digg at around 11:00 a.m. I’m still trying to deal with the fallout of it all.
Now, HardOCP has been around quite a while – it’s one of the major computer review Web sites. HardOCP has tons of bandwidth – they are used to very high traffic every day.
That said… the site went down. [H]ard.
We had our own little version of March Madness. I’m perversely proud of that.
Of course, user Mink78 at Digg.com pointed out that my “network performance needs some work.” No – the irony is not lost on me, and I’m sure it’s not lost on HardOCP, which, after all, sells advertising space. If the page can’t be loaded, neither can the ads.
So, while HardOCP’s problems with serving pages are problems that they’re happy to have, I’m sure they’d be even happier if they didn’t have them. Web 2.0 sites have the potential to make a story amazingly popular very, very quickly. Traffic often comes in spikes which are rarely predictable – so you need to be able to know what your network can handle, for how long, and compare it to normal.