[porterhaney]

I think it's particularly interesting to watch some internet event go "mainstream" and watch even large services like reddit strain under the load. Put some perspective around how many people true mainstream media services reach.

[calinet6]

I'm very interested in how quickly they manage to bring it back up.

... so naturally I'll refresh it every few seconds.

[throwaway1979]

Can't create an account now ... grr ... and I really wanted to ask a question :(

[mindcrime]

Weird... I am guessing that if Obama was going to be on Reddit, they would have given the Reddit staff some early notice, in order to add some extra preparations for the load. Or maybe not, does anybody know if there's any sort of normal protocol around this sort of thing?

[citricsquid]

The AMA mods often arrange high profile AMAs amongst themselves -- or with the reddit community staff involved -- so it's likely they were aware before hand. I can't check the sidebar because reddit isn't responding, but they normally have the "upcoming" AMAs in the sidebar and lots of are listed days/weeks in advance.

[duck]

I think this was a surprise as it wasn't listed there until 30 or so minutes ago.

[ChiperSoft]

The reddit admins knew. Heuypriest himself confirmed the validity of the AMA.

[_delirium]

Since I'm not up on the Reddit staff, in case anyone else is wondering, Hueypriest is Erik Martin, Reddit's General Manager (formerly Community manager) https://www.twitter.com/hueypriest

[acomar]

Kn0thing jumped in to confirm it too.

[sukuriant]

I was just going to say that. While, Reddit's not "down" for me, every time I click the "show more comments" button, red text that says "loading" shows up and it ... never ... loads. Considering Reddit's usual traffic, this must be a truly unprecedented weight on the servers.

[Codhisattva]

Yes indeed. The scalability of Amazon.com is truly a work of engineering genius.

[RandallBrown]

From what I've heard from Amazon employees, it's barely holding together and hardly genius.

Of course, that same scalability (AWS) is what powers Reddit and dozens of other major websites.

[Codhisattva]

It's been a few years but when I saw Amazon's architecture overview presentation at OSCON it was brilliant work.

[Aldor]

To be fair (as a longtime redditor), reddit is guaranteed to go down after anything slightly out of the ordinary (and even then it's not too uncommon).

[spyder]

The difference is that the "true mainstream media" is one-directional, so they are just broadcasting the show. If there would be a show with Obama answering telephone calls on live TV or radio, then very few calls could be heard live. If Reddit would do only broadcasting then it would be an easier problem because reads can be cached easier then reads + writes.

[jvanderwal]

I would be very interested in seeing some traffic stats once this is over.