So I got dugg earlier today, neat. I woke up at around 9am (EST) and saw that my post on how not to optimize a MySQL query had just made the front page of Digg. Cool. I ran tail -f on my apache logs and saw lots of traffic. Even cooler. I ran top and saw the load average was around 50 (that’s a five followed by a zero, on a single processor box). Not so cool. I immediately got up and took a shower, cuz I can’t do jack without a shower. After showering I installed WP Cache.

As you can see from the MRTG graphs below it made a bit of difference (note that the load is multiplied by 100 in the graph). Before WP Cache the load average was bouncing around in the 30 to 70 range. The site was responding, but very s - l - o - w - l - y. It hadn’t been ‘dugg’, but it was close. Tip: having a dedicated server (or two in this case) helps here. After WP Cache the web server load dropped to about 0.02. Latency dropped to near zero. Beautiful.

You can see the difference it made in the network utilization data. The green is incoming traffic, blue is outgoing. The green spike is the incoming SQL result sets coming from the database server. After WP Cache was installed it (predictably) dropped to pre-digg levels. Curiously, the database server never flinched. Apparently WP is not that database intensive.

I’ve also posted a number of graphs from Google Analytics, in case anyone was curious. I like these numbers. 73% Firefox vs. 14% IE. 15% Mac, 10% Linux. Sweet. There have been a total of 17,175 visits so far, the peak was 5,421 visitors from 9am to 10am. Note that some of the times may need adjustment since Google Analytics is PST and the server is Central.

If you’re interested in some statistic that I forgot to mention, you can download a copy of the log file (gzip format) (bzip2 version) for analysis. It’s 2.1MB using bzip2, 4MB gzipped, 125MB unzipped. If you find anything interesting post a comment and let me know. If you can’t figure out how to calculate whatever you’re looking for post a comment anyways and I’ll see if I can help you (or maybe someone else can).

Load Average

April 10 - Digg Effect Load Average

CPU Usage

April 10 - Digg Effect CPU Usage

Network Utilization

April 10 - Digg Effect Network Utilization

Traffic Stats

April 10 - Digg Effect Google Analytics

Browser Version

April 10 - Digg Effect Browser Version

Platform

April 10 - Digg Effect Platform