Political Sites Scale Up For Election Traffic

miller60 writes "News sites and political blogs are expecting extraordinary traffic tonight as Americans track results of the Presidential election, and are scaling their infrastructure to meet the challenge. Yahoo anticipates its Election Night traffic may be three times the volume seen in 2004, when it had 80 million page views on Election Day and 142 million more visits the following day. Hosting companies say customers have been ordering extra servers and load balancing services, while content delivery networks are also expecting a busy night. Will traffic approach record levels? Akamai's Net Usage Index, which tracks traffic to its customer news sites, is one metric to watch."

Comments

TV Viewership will go down?

[xmas2003]

Since so many people are checking online, I bet TV viewership goes down - be interesting to compare and see how strong an inverse relationship it ends up being.

I.e. in the old days, everyone would watch the TV anchors drone on so they could hear a snippet what each particular viewer was interested in. But using pull (instead of push) technology, you can zoom in on what you are interested in much more quickly and efficiently.

P.S. In the meantime, I'm support the HULK for President! ;-)

Re:TV Viewership will go down?

[dmomo]

It's funny, this ability to pull info like that. Like you said, we used to wait for that snippet of information. Now that I can get it right away, I find myself constantly refreshing looking for change in the data. I look at the numbers and watch the votes come trickling in. Still, I want more data. It's a weird obsession. The more we get, the more we want. Oddly, no matter how much there is, I always feel a little unfulfilled. Can one be addicted to information?

I just want a bell

[MosesJones]

All I want is something I can subscribe to that will "ring" when the election gets called. I want to know as soon as its called so I can flip on the TV and watch the acceptance/submission speeches but I don't want to keep polling a website.

A simple SMS of "Obama has won... Wheeeee" or "Oh Fuck its Palin" would be sufficient.

Anyone know where I can get it?

Re:I just want a bell

[internerdj]

Do you want it today or after the Florida recount of the recount of the recount or after the resulting lawsuit against Florida is resolved?

Re:I just want a bell

[lazyforker]

Post your 'phone number on /. - I'm sure one or two people would be willing to send a message when the results are called.

Re:I just want a bell

[fishbowl]

>All I want is something I can subscribe to that will "ring" when the election gets called.

December 20, I believe, is the date that the Electoral College convenes in the Senate.

All we have until then, amounts to "reasonable assurances" that we know how the EC will vote in the Election.

Winning the at-large election today will certainly be cause for celebration for the supporters of the candidate who wins, but this is still no guarantee that today's winner will be elected, only that electors who are pledged to that candidate will meet in the Senate on Election Day in December.

Not Just the US

[whencanistop]

To be fair, Yahoo will have to cope with all those people outside the US (yeah, I know - we don't count) who are looking for detailed analysis of the result that they just can't get on TV.

I don't know why you'd be checking Yahoo! news though. Surely you'd opt for one of the news organisations that has a history of journalism (eg BBC or Reuters).

Maybe it is just me.

Other neat metrics

[Yonkeltron]

Also of note for looking at metrics today: http://www.internettrafficreport.com/ http://www.internetpulse.net/

No kidding

[MikeRT]

It took me 2.5 hours to vote this morning. There was a line waiting to vote that was starting to wrap around the entire outside of the school, its parking lot and all the way up inside toward the very back of the school. I've never seen this many people interested in voting, and I live on the outskirts of Northern Virginia (Herndon, to be exact) where we really don't have that many people.

MMOOOOOOAAARRRRRR !!!

[ciderVisor]

F5 F5 F5 F5 F5 F5 F5 F5 F5 F5 F5 F5

Americans choose none of the above

[David Gerard]

BOOTH OF DESPAIR, Ohio, Tuesday - Americans today committed egregious acts of democracy to elect the next failed administration and the next failed Congress.

In a fabulous upset, almost no-one could bring themselves to vote directly for either of the official candidates, instead opting for a write-in vote. Popular write-ins included "the black guy", "the old guy", "McCain from 2000" and "Tina Fey." The seventeen votes for "The Invisible Man" were tallied for Joe Biden. Several tons of Liquid Paper needed to be scraped off voting machines.

The winning candidate turned out to be Noneof Theabove, 46, of Dogshit, Nebraska. Apart from the Presidency, Mr Theabove won 72% of Congressional seats and all Senate seats up for election this year.

Mr Theabove's policies include drinking, shouting abuse at the television and inchoate existential despair. "He completely embodies the national mood," said Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight.com, just before applying for a new job flipping burgers.

A majority of US soldiers in Afghanistan stated the place was "just fine, really" and they were learning to speak Pashto rather than returning. Canada looked south and snickered, though not very much as they still had Stephen Harper to cope with. The Kingdom of Mexico stated its "regret" today that it has had to close its borders to American refugees.

and Voting Machines choose one of their own

[hansamurai]

http://www.theonion.com/content/video/voting_machines_elect_one_of

Those metrics in easier to understand forms

[IamTheRealMike]

142 million visits in one day is about ~1640 visits per second. However, traffic isn't distributed evenly - typically peak is twice that of average. So they need to be provisioned to handle ~3287 visits per second.

They'll also want some headroom to ensure they can still serve in case of hardware failure, so let's imagine they provision for 4000 visits/second.

The Yahoo homepage, at least for me, triggers about 32 file loads on a cold cache, so that's a peak hits per second of about 128,000.

For comparison, Akamai globally peaks at about 6.5 million hits/second.