Over 15,000 downloads in less than 3 days
RapidWeaver 4.0 was released on the 29th of May at 12:00pm (BST). In the following 60 hours it was downloaded over 15,000 times burning through 550 GB* of bandwidth via Amazon. Our shiny new website had 194,834 page views by 46,830 visitors, 31,770 of those were unique.
Due to previous RapidWeaver releases bringing the site down, we put a few things in place to safe guard against this from happening again.
We got ourselves a brand new quad core Xserve, hosted by the nice peeps at MacDock. Just to be sure we served up all the downloads via Amazon S3. But alas, it still wasn't good enough. Our website was pretty much inaccessible for most of the 29th due to the sheer amount of traffic we received.
Thankfully, by the 30th of May the traffic was at a more manageable level and realmacsoftware.com was back online. We're still getting more traffic than before, but the new server is holding up amazingly well.
We're already looking at how we can improve our setup and stop the site from going down at the launch of the next major version. If you have any suggestions, please feel free to leave a comment below.
* This is the combined figure for RapidWeaver 4.0 and the Quicktour movies.
About the Author: Dan Counsell is the Director of Realmac Software, but is more commonly know as the Big Chief.
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