We Survived an Influx of Roughly 187,000 Reddit Users Caused By an Old Post on Secret Coca-Cola Millionaires
As tends to happen once every year or two, the unexpected “make the front page of Reddit” event occurred last night, in the midst of the site renovations; an inopportune time but I’ll take it. Aaron and I were watching Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell on iTunes at around 2 a.m. when I saw the MySQL server straining under an incredible amount of requests. It was the old post about the secret Coca-Cola millionaires in Quincy, Florida. Something like 90 requests a second were slamming the data center up in Michigan. Traffic source: Reddit. Short investigation later, turns out it became the number one post of the “Today I Learned” subreddit and made the overall front page of the site.