This morning one of the Powerblogs servers was overloaded and responding very slowly to web requests when it was responding at all. At first I suspected network trouble, but it turned out that Gaijin Biker got linked on fark with the description, "Buddhist temple in Japan 'devoted entirely to the worship of women's breasts' (with pic.)" (here's that post, if you're curious). So, about 75,000 people came over to take a look at it, most of them in the morning and early afternoon. If you've looked at his site, you'll notice that it's got a lot of graphics, and of course there was the advertised picture, so those 75,000 people drove about 3.3 million http requests on the web server.
To put this in perspective:
root@server2:/var/log/apache# ls -1sShr *.access.log | tail -5 25M themoderatevoice.access.log 36M volokh.access.log 39M deanesmay.access.log 458M ridingsun.access.log
To make a long story short, while the server was tuned to take instalanches well, this was way beyond an instalanche, and the server wasn't properly configured to handle it as well as it could. I re-tuned the webserver configs, and things were fine again. Now all of the powerblogs servers should be able to handle these sorts of loads without slowing down. (Unfortunately, webserver tuning is still something of an art — setting the parameters too far can cause your webserver to simply fail entirely and stop responding to requests when it gets heavily loaded — and what the parameters should be depend on your entire system, not just the web server.)
So, the servers should not get overloaded by traffic for the forseeable future. However, if you hear that congress is about to pass a law requiring all able-bodied adults to go view your pictures of breasts commentary at least 5 times a day, would you please email us with a heads-up?