livecounter

The last month, the livecounter.theyosh.nl website had a busy period. Almost every day we reached 900+ requests per second. That is about 30.000+ users that is seeing the counter. The problem that arises is that there not enough upload bandwidth. We have updated the livecounter under the hood, in such a way, that we can not handle 40.000+ users!! That is an increase of 33%!

Houston, we have problem

This month the counters of the livecounter website are running in overtime. There are a few new websites using the counter, they doubled the total amount of requests! The website was doing some 100-150 req/s average daily. Since this month the amount of requests are almost 400 req/s.

Due this amount we are experiencing some performance problems at spike moments. We are looking into new ways to reduce the load and still handle this amount of traffic. Here are some stats:

This week we hit a new marker. The Live counter server did a whooping 1100+ requests per second. Which results in more than 30.000 connected users. The server had a bit difficult, and for now it is the max. We are still working on (small) improvements.

It started a few years ago with about 50 req/s but now we are running at 150-200 req/s consistently. This is running on a basic computer with a consumer ADSL line. The mission is to increase the amount of users, with the same bandwidth and CPU usage. And we are still growing :D

A screenshot:

Today a new version of the Livecounter software is online!. After running the software for a few years, it was time to make an update. The code has be changed over the years. But there was not a big major release until now!. The javascript code is almost completely rewritten.

This new version has the following updates: