When crashing is (sort of) a good thing


First off, please accept my apologies for the spinning 'wheels' and other loading symbols that indicate our website isn't quite serving pages nearly as fast as it wishes it could, particularly during Friday night lights with a bunch of great matchups.

There has been (and continues to be) a significant amount of both money and man-hours spent on getting our servers to be as efficient and load-capable as we are able to, but it seems on certain nights that no amount of preparation can help us weather the storm of user traffic we experience.

Last Friday, we recorded nearly 50,000 pages served in two hours from a constant stream of well over a thousand active connections, somewhere in the vicinity of 63 pages per second during that timespan if I did the math right.

What those numbers mean is that simply put, the demand for scores on Fridays and some Saturdays nights are nothing short of incredible. Clearly there is a huge following for prep football in Hawaii, and we are very grateful that people turn to ScoringLive first for the latest.

Traffic during the 'busy times' are so overwhelming in fact that we are considering implementing a segmentation strategy to help keep the site alive and kicking as well as it possibly can be during peak hours.

The strategy involves limiting access to the most trafficked areas of the site only during football Fridays and selected Saturdays, allowing access primarily to the site's main index, and football game pages.

Whether or not we will need to implement this will depend on whether or not the 'wheels' start spinning. But I thought it was worth a blog post to provide at least a little bit of awareness, especially if we end up trying to use it to stem the tide.

But I for one am crossing my fingers that the fortifications we've done over the last week will prove effective.

Here's to hoping, and here's to another great weekend of high school sports.



Reach Brien Ing at [email protected].