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! ;-)

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.