An Ostrich Got Fireballed
On July 25th at 6 PM, John Gruber tweeted. Afterwards, an unimaginable flow of visitors suddenly made it to the homepage, almost quadrupling the previous user count in less than 24 hours.
Dramatic isn’t it? It is. The server didn’t crash, but it suffered from extreme slowness for the whole day after.
As of this writing, 4240 users signed in with Twitter for Ostrich. Friday I was writing about 1000 users. The site received about 20 000 visits since yesterday evening and still going strong. The site got first linked on Daring Fireball and then early on today by TUAW.
As a result, the User Experience of Ostrich, its most dearest aspect, has dropped a few notches for everyone. A few notches is putting it lightly. 1/4 of the requests fail, opening the new tweet window takes over 10 seconds and getting through the process of signing up for Ostrich is painstakingly long.
Today, I got Ostrich a brand spanking new server. It will be overkill for now, but I’m hoping it’ll run out of juice quickly enough, proving the success of Ostrich in the process. The new server should be operational sometime Wednesday. For now, I’m going to attempt and optimize the current server, probably during the night to cause as few apparent downtime as possible.
Ostrich is bootstrapped and everything has been paid for by myself. Please help me by donating a small amount to help me pay for the server bills:
Since Friday I’ve been working like a mad man on a new more reliable version of the extension. In the process I have also created a cool framework for developing Safari extension better and faster. I’ll release it open source when I deem version 0.1 is ready.
Thanks for your patience, indulge Ostrich’s slowness!
