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by abfabry 4959 days ago
Art.sy was lucky to be the top article on NYTimes (the one with the large image at the top of their homepage) from about 5pm to 11pm, were the #3 most emailed, and the NYT article was #3 on Hacker News. We went to 1500 concurrents almost instantly, and maintained it for several hours. This is nothing for many large sites, but was the most we'd had. We had added some extra dynos in preparation, and our API response time actually went down as more obscure routes were hit and cached.

We prepared for the worst, though, and had built a failsafe way to progressively shut off more demanding features on the site (for instance: our related search results on artwork pages) in case we were getting overwhelmed. Much better to have a reduced feature set during launch than a broken site. Fortunately we didn't have to flip that switch!

1 comments

That's insane, congrats on staying up, and thanks for the response :)