I'm using a continuation of this thread as it's a great sign of how we've improved the servers and site in the years since, despite the continued increase in visitors. Major thanks to L2 members for allowing us to pay for this continued evolution in hosting. Remember, we're not owned by a media group or Mark Zuckerberg.....and there are very few large independent sites around these days.
To put this into context per the improvements, our cruising level (average use of the forum during a day even when there isn't a launch etc.) is the level that would have crashed us during the aforementioned "Bad Gateway!" days. However, I think we all know Falcon Heavy is going to create unprecedented demand and we've been working towards this with improved hosting and numerous other changes to at least give us a fighting chance.
Some pointers on where surges in demand come from during major launch events:
1) Prelaunch - people checking the internet for info ahead of the webcast. When the webcast starts a good amount of people concentrate on that.
2) Holds, delays - people rushing to get more info on what's caused it.
3) Post launch (but still live coverage) - an example is booster landing but shaky webcast of status, coast phase, etc.
4) Post-Webcast - this is where we see incredible surges as people rush on to the internet to discuss what they've just watched.
5) Failures, issues. Which is why CRS-7 was the last time we were hitting problems and had to cull guests for a while.
6) Other sites being knocked off line via high demand and their visitors heading to us and other sites to keep up.
Interesting sidenote, I believe our "record" for the number of people on site at the same time was Curiosity's landing, but everyone was watching the webcast and not hammering NSF. One of those lifetime moments where we all wanted to be in "the same room" during that historic moment.
For this event we'll keep the forum as it is until we reach a certain level, then
we may use the option to remove guest access to the forum to help us on the demand side. The problem with that is a lot of guests then quickly surge to sign up to gain a login and that is demanding too, so we'll potentially cease new registrations during that period.While I'd love NSF to be able to cope with thousands of people mashing F5 (not that even major sites can cope with that), its primary mission is to document live events. It's actually more about before and after launches per its news and usefulness....but documenting launches as they happen so people can refer back to them, with visuals, screenshots, photos and videos is where our strength is, especially in this era of text based Web 2.0. Being different is what makes you valuable. We're bandwidth heavy by nature.
That's the main reason we protect the site during surges, to allow for that live documentation of the event so people can refer back to it with text and visual resources, all posted live, but available for years to come. The stats show some people - to this day - regularly go through our live flight days of Shuttle missions, for example.
Also, if we do struggle, there are alternatives, especially ones owned by big companies who can cope with huge demands, such as Facebook and Reddit.
Unofficial sites, but I'm sure you all know them, but still worth bookmarking.
SpaceX Reddit:
https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/ SpaceX Facebook
https://www.facebook.com/groups/spacexgroup/ Who knows, maybe our improvements are at such a level we'll be able to cope, but I'd rather post this before the event and not as some "sorry the site went down", post.
The site will be heavily monitored and Mark will be waving his magic wand around, so let's see how we do, but note the potential mitigation if you're reading NSF as a lurker/guest, which is by far the majority of visitors here.
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