Our main server traffic. The first burst happened the night of Apr 7 when Fark and Boing Boing linked the Pakistani ferris wheel. The second burst started the night of Apr 13 when Boing Boing linked the thread for the foam test.
Since the first link was to the blog view, it generated fewer hits per page and we could handle that traffic well. After the first round of performance improvements on Apr 16, the server continued to get hit from the new round of linkers.
The columns go: visitors, pages, hits, overall bandwidth.
I moved the foam images to the backup server to lighten the load on the main server. Here are the backup server's numbers. Since it's only the JPGs, there were no visitors to track or pages to load, but 11 hits per visit to the main thread:
