Happy New Year, everyone.
Earlier this week I came across a tweet by a front-end web developer of GOV.UK (https://www.gov.uk/). He posted a screenshot from their Google Analytics account showing over 44,000 concurrent website visitors. That tweet was actually the first in a series of tweets showing how quickly and massively their website traffic increased. In less than a minute, the visitor count rose above 117,000.
https://twitter.com/TheRealNooshu/status/1346183432876019712… (scroll to read the other tweets in his series)
Here are some highlights of his commentary:
-The government made an announcement that garnered significant attention (not sure of the announcement and didn’t research it)
-Traffic grew from 45K users to 769K users in 11 minutes.
-Google Analytics doesn’t capture all users. So, the actual traffic was almost assuredly higher.
-Their content delivery network was reporting as many as 88,000 requests per second.
That content delivery network was Fastly, which he credited for its superb performance in making sure all these users had successful website visits. Here’s that tweet: https://twitter.com/TheRealNooshu/status/1346201664726978563…. The CDN’s caching of website content, which allows for quicker delivery to end users, was a major factor. Without optimal performance by their CDN, the website could’ve crashed and/or many users would have had sub-optimal experiences and not trusted this website during future announcements.
Some of you who are better versed in Information Technology might have additional insights and opinions. My knowledge in this space is limited.
-ElonFeeNix
no position in FSLY