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Comment by idlewords | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure what you're talking about. There was no downtime, and no slow access.

We went from our normal rate of 5k bookmark writes per day to over 5 million in a 24 hour period without going offline.

Hell, we didn't even get slow. Our median page load times stayed well under a third of a second. We had no advance notice of the announcement and had to handle the spike in traffic on the fly, on one server. Our competitors crashed, we stayed up.

I'm pretty proud of this and I think our users got their money's worth from Pinboard today.

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Going from 5k to 5M is really impressive - congrats on your sudden impressive growth!

However, the "there was no downtime" seems a bit disingenuous given my own experience signing up for the service yesterday. I received many "service unavailable" messages during signup, after clicking on the email verification link, and finally after signing up. Searching Twitter at the time for "Pinboard" showed that many other users were getting the same message (e.g. http://twitter.com/davekincaid/status/15520511979167744) ... there were many others, but unfortunately Twitter's 'older tweets' search doesn't seem to be working now.

I actually didn't care that the service was down for me even though I had just paid to sign up for it; I figured you guys were getting absolutely hammered by the unexpected news around Delicious. However, seeing your response here was surprising - either you didn't have monitoring tools set up to show you that indeed there was downtime or we have a drastically different definition of 'downtime'.

It's the former - on our end we didn't see any errors logged, and had no trouble reaching the site. We did see sporadic reports on Twitter and tried to chase them down, but there was so much going on we couldn't spend much time on it. Eventually pvg made some apache config changes on the fly that seemed to banish the problem for good.

If that was the general experience people had with the site last night, then it absolutely was downtime.

Thanks for the response and insight - I definitely understand that it's hard to keep track of sporadic issues especially when usage is exploding like yours did in the last few days.

> There was no downtime, and no slow access.

There was for me. I tried signing up after that comment but had trouble. In fact, I thought the site was just slow in general. It was the first time I've visited, so I don't know if that response time was normal, but it was slow nonetheless.

Based on other responses here and what I've heard from friends and seen on Twitter etc., I don't think I am the only one that felt this. I'm glad you're happy with your performance, and I think it's great you guys were a destination a lot of delicious users chose to head to, but I was just expressing an opinion.

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