
Ask HN: What is the most amount of people you have had on your site at one time? - sw007
Mine and my mates site GetInspired365.com has just been featured on BBC Click - http://t.co/0OmbHSSwuk - and were staggered to see we had 250 people on our site at one point. What's the most you've had on your site? Just interested to see as means of a comparison against other sites.<p>By the way, if you're able to get a small mention on BBC Click, we'd highly recommend it. We've seen some great triffic and feedback since our mention.
======
Asparagirl
Over a hundred thousand. I was the Senior Web Producer (head geek) at Bravo,
the cable channel, and we did live voting during "Project Runway" first-run
episode commercial breaks, where viewers would respond to on-air questions
either through our site or through SMS. Vote tallies were displayed during
later commercial breaks, after a competitor had been eliminated. People who
voted would also be entered in contests to get prizes and their names splashed
on screen during the live broadcasts.

Then we'd do it all again, live, for the West Coast airing of the episode, the
same night.

Season finale episodes brought roughly a bajillion people to our site
simultaneously, because everyone wanted to "participate" in telling the world
which contestant they wanted to win the season.

Thank God for Akamai...

~~~
timjahn
That's awesome! How many people it take total to run the operation?

~~~
Asparagirl
In LA (Burbank, actually) we had one manager, two devs (me and a slightly more
junior person), and two video editors who transcoded stuff almost on-the-fly
and kept our online video library humming along. In New York (at 30 Rock) we
had about four content and social media people, two designers, and a
photographer.

This was about five years ago, so the set-up is a little more robust now. For
example, they now have a CMS to manage web content, whereas we used to code
and manage all our assets by hand. And back then they were too stingy to buy
an extra server to automate a lot of the processes, so I actually had to stay
late every week to literally "push the button" to make things go live in sync
with the on-air broadcasts. All kinds of crazy stuff, on a shoestring budget.

But yeah, if you're talking about code stuff alone, we only had two actual
coders/devs, me and another girl. Fun times!

------
typicalrunt
I'm curious about what you mean by 'most amount of people you have had on your
site at one time'. This can mean a few different things...

1) For monitoring applications like Chartbeat, IIRC they count a user as
concurrent if they are on the site anytime within the past 30 seconds. 2) I've
seen real-time monitoring systems count a concurrent user as any visitor in
the last 5 seconds. 3) Lastly, the only real raw numbers that I've seen are
the traffic hits through an F5 load balancer to a set of backend servers, and
that is the only number that will give you an unbiased # hits per second in
real-time. Unfortunately, this amounts to requests (HTML) to the server and
may not be a 1:1 ratio with users.

So in terms of what I've seen, it depends on the type of calls and the
application. For the EA forums (forums.ea.com) which I was in charge of up
until March 2013...

For #1, forums would regularly reach 15,000 on the launch of a new game. We
would sustain that for ~12 hours [1]. On just an average normal non-event day,
it pushes 3000 concurrents. For #2, I've seen something north of 3000 for EA
forums. For #3, the F5 would report peaks of 200 requests per second.

When I built the Campus Wide Login (<http://www.cwl.ubc.ca>) SSO auth system
for UBC about 11 years ago (still in use today) we would have almost 50-75% of
the full campus using it at once, which is about 30k concurrents
(unfortunately I didn't have access to the numbers over the F5 LB). However,
most of these calls were for the HTML which then went through an SOA (XML-RPC,
ugh) architecture, so I'm sure the req/s was much higher on the XML-RPC
backend.

[1] this is a feat in itself because most of the forum data is not cached
because the business wanted the data in real-time, so the read databases would
receive a lot of traffic when the web servers spiked.

Edit: formatting

------
simonbarker87
Our company (www.radfan.com) was featured on BBC News Look North for 90
seconds (no web address mentioned so pure google searches) and I watched our
google analytics real time climb to 1200 people simultaneous.

We were on BBC Radio 2 Drive Time the Friday before (web address mentioned
this time) and we got about the same.

Shopify did an amazing job dealing with the traffic spike.

Good job getting on Click, that's awesome. We got lucky with the bad weather
in March making our launch a relevant story.

~~~
sw007
Thanks very much. And neat site - I actually have used this before!

~~~
simonbarker87
No probs, good to hear!

For those interested in how an ecommerce site stacks up with traffic spikes,
Shopify did a great job, the weak link was paypal. We had a good number of
(potential) customers email to us to say that paypal locked up during payment,
we were taking several orders a minute for a while there but still annoying
that some were dropped.

One of our mailing lists also grew by 1200 names in 3 hours and Mail Chimp
coped fine.

------
bpatrianakos
From 1 to 20 then down to about 3 on average now. I've had my project
(<https://writeapp.me>) on HN a few times but it really went nowhere. Recently
however its been featured on MakeUseOf at least twice, Web Appstorm, and a
number of other tech/teacher blogs.

Before the MakeUseOf article I'd get 3 to 10 hits a day with 1 visitor at a
time. After the first MakeUseOf article it went to about 20 at a time for
about a day. After that the site has been picked up by other blogs (some of
them review it multiple times on different days) so the traffic has increased
about 100% from pre-review levels and has been holding steady at about 100-ish
visitors a day and 3 users at a time normally. Note that there are obviously
periods in the day where its 0 because you can't have 100 uniques and 3
visitors on site at the same time all day. The math doesn't add up. I'm just
talking about what I see whenever I check my analytics which is pretty often
during the weekdays.

------
jedberg
My own homepage? 1 (usually me) The last big site I worked on? About 55,000
concurrent users on an average day before I left (now it's about 110,000).

------
DougWebb
I used to be the tech lead for the UI and much of the infrastructure behind
ovidsp.ovid.com. We regularly had 20000-50000 concurrent user sessions active.
Each one had a dedicated backend process, so we had an exact count of active
users. The UI served over 1 billion http requests per year... using a custom
http server I wrote in Perl :)

------
Achshar
About 20 on average and 30 in rare occasions. It's a media player app for
chrome with about 5k active weekly users.

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/achshar-
player/fdd...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/achshar-
player/fddboknafkepdchidokknkeidnaejnkh)

------
enome
Ten people at the same time is my max for a personal project
(<http://sproutsheet.com> or <http://sproutshit.com> as the haters like to
call it) when I linked it on reddit.

~~~
xSwag
I really like the design! Nice concept!

~~~
enome
Thanks, I found out that grower enthausiasts have a lot of data to remember so
thought it would be a cool app to make. I noticed that cannabis cultivation is
really big on the internet so asked a reddit community what app they would
like. My first prototype looked like twitter but they didn't really care for
that. They just wanted an easy way to link data to a certain date. Would also
love to have some vegie growers on the site but it's hard to get a foot in
smaller communities without looking like a spammer. Anyway it's not really a
commercial project but I do get a kick out of people using and enjoying my
website.

~~~
xSwag
I wish I could have cannabis cultivation in the UK, but unfortunately it's
illegal. I've been pondering whether I should start a basic kitchen garden
type thing and your app just gave me a reason to!

~~~
enome
I've been thinking of growing indoor stawberries. Can never have enough
strawberries. Red Alpine strawberries gives you fruit the whole year through.
They are a bit smaller but they look awesome: <http://imgur.com/8JzBPVr>

------
mburst
I had about 180 according to Google Analytics for
[http://maxburstein.com/blog/python-shortcuts-for-the-
python-...](http://maxburstein.com/blog/python-shortcuts-for-the-python-
beginner/)

It was at the top of Hacker News and /r/programming for a little bit. It
stayed pretty constant at that level for about half the day.

My first post to get over 120 users at a time was
<http://maxburstein.com/blog/creating-resume-using-latex/>

It was at the top of /r/programming with over 1000 points so it was also
getting some traffic from /r/all.

------
anderspetersson
My side-project (<http://www.quizme.se>) got posted to a decent sized
facebook-group and peaked at 400 active visitors. Then the postgres-server
stalled at 100% CPU-usage and the site went down. I was at day-work and could
not do much about it.

The hourly graph from Google analytics looks like this:
[https://www.diigo.com/item/p/podoedezbpdaaccrczbabdsacq/05eb...](https://www.diigo.com/item/p/podoedezbpdaaccrczbabdsacq/05ebb740128f9f599c8e4caed72a27f3)

------
JamesCasanova
It depends on where I pull the traffic from: when I post on social networks,
like Tumblr, I usually get at most 3 concurrent at a time. If they come from
direct source they are usually more spread around the clock also due to their
time zones differences. The peak I had was when I wrote a comment on the Sex
channel on Reddit right after the launch of my platform
(<http://www.sexycrets.com>) a few months ago.

------
cagenut
178K is the biggest I can find a screenshot proof of:
<https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Aa7f-uvCMAQF1th.png>

Thats on one site out of 8 that share the same cluster/platform, so the net
total would have been in the mid 200K's.

edit: props to chartbeat for even being able to track such things, I'm just
scaling reads, they're scaling writes.

------
tahoecoder
My site made it to #1 on hacker news last wednesday for a couple of hours. It
peaked at 287 concurrents. Unfortunately, I wasn't expecting that kind of
surge and only had it on a small linode, so it couldn't handle the traffic.
Since then, I've moved it to an S3 bucket with cloudfront as a cdn.
<http://www.appraptor.com>

------
androa
I was one of two developers on a social media network in Norway, at peak hours
(from about 20:00 till 22:00) we had 60.000 unique users with activity within
the last 10 minutes. This generated about 400 dynamic req/s and about 6000
static req/s. We managed this sustained traffic with a total of 12 webservers
(apache + memcached), 4 databases (mysql) and 6 Varnishes.

------
kurtko
Main Site: Around 2000 IIRC, before it crashed, anyway. This was back in the
days of Digg, and less robust hosting. Average is 150-250 at a time, less at
night, more during the day.

Micro-Site: We set up an experimental just-for-fun site with a bit of a viral
edge and got 1.1 million visitors in one day, mostly from China - it
apparently front-paged on a few major sites over there.

------
philipwalton
When one of my articles made it to the #2 spot on Hacker News, I was watching
my Google Analytics Real-Time stats pretty closely. It got as high as ~700
people on at one point. (Here's the submission:
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5062761>)

~~~
bobfunk
Our recent post on the Webpop blog about a/b testing a puppy photo
(<http://www.webpop.com/blog/2013/04/16/can-a-puppy-sell-a-cms>) got to #2 as
well.

Sat at a pretty constant 250 online visitors for hours. Pretty sure the brief
peak must have been close to 700 as well.

Fortunately Webpop is built to handle that kind of traffic, so we never had to
worry about the site crumbling under the load...

~~~
philipwalton
Yeah, I'd be curious to see traffic data from people who got to various spots
on the front page and see what trends emerge.

Though, now I'm remembering that the post was also on /r/webdev and
/r/web_design, so that skews things a bit.

------
habosa
No idea how many at one time however I did get 50,000 hits for a post on my
blog that sat in the HN top 10 for most of a day. That's like 34 hits a minute
so I can safely assume I must have hit at least 10 at a time at some point
during the day.

------
npguy
We had 390 users at one point when we hit the HN frontpage for a very short
time for this post

[http://statspotting.com/pgs-hidden-message-in-hackernews-
alg...](http://statspotting.com/pgs-hidden-message-in-hackernews-algorithm/)

------
baby
I think somewhere around 6000. Is there a way to see this easily on Google
Analytics?

Also you have to precise. I was removing a real visitor after 30 seconds. Some
websites I know are doing it after 2 minutes... It changes your numbers a lot.

------
emilioolivares
284 just from someone linking to us on a comment thread on Reddit:
<http://imgur.com/M6oiypj>

my site: <http://www.flipmeme.com>

------
dittes
4500+ on a small "4 hour venture" project of mine. could ahve climbed to 5 or
6k, but the server crashed before. <http://imgur.com/ossUOZR>

------
sw007
Clicky's - <http://t.co/0OmbHSSwuk> (BBC Click) Our site -
<http://GetInspired365.com>

------
maresca
30 at a time from some small subreddits on my site <http://poemr.com>

------
jmedwards
Congratulations on the BBC Click feature!

Around 2500 on www.kayako.com after a particular newsletter went out to our
customers.

------
zmitri
around 3000 for a half hour or so when Blink-182 pushed out content to their
social channels (Facebook/Twitter) using our site. Have also had slow build up
to 2800 when one page went viral. The site/app is <http://backspac.es>

------
legierski
Nearly 1500 concurrent visitors on a blog post that got to the top of HN quite
a while ago.

------
centdev
Google analytics real time showed 22-25k during its peak daily

------
michaelmior
~3k when a Facebook app we were working on went viral.

------
edwintorok
s/triffic/traffic

------
waltz
one

