President Obama’s Ask Me Anything on Reddit needed 60 dedicated servers (!)

Apparently, POTUS is popular. 60 extra servers popular.

President Obama’s Ask Me Anything two days ago was a massive success, as Reddit highlighted earlier today in a blog post. Not only did the page get 2.99 million views on the day of the event, it has received another 2.3 million page views already as of this morning.

Perhaps the most surprising stat was the number of servers Reddit added to handle the onslaught of traffic. In preparation, Reddit added 30 dedicated servers “just for the comment thread.” When that turned out to not be enough, developers added another 30 dedicated servers.

Besides telling you how popular and/or controversial President Obama is, that also tells you that Reddit can scale servers very, very quickly.

More interesting stats from Reddit:

• Peak transfer: 48 MBs per second
• Peak traffic: over 100,000 page views per minute
• Peak concurrent visitors: 198,000
• Peak share of Reddit traffic to the AMA page: 30 percent (average for a very hot topic is 2-5 percent)

In fact, Obama’s AMA is the “only link in recorded history to have surpassed the front page.”

Reddit’s popularity seems to be growing with no end in sight, with between two and eight million unique visitors every month and six to eight million pageviews a day. Obama answering questions on the site will certainly increase that trend and expose the site to a wider, more mainstream audience.

Obama’s most interesting comment? The recipe for White House Beer will be available shortly.

And from the president’s own tongue: it’s tasty.

photo credit: Chuckumentary via photo pin cc