MacRumors.com's Webcast Stats during the Macworld San Francisco 2006 Keynote
On January 10th, 2006, MacRumors.com successfully delivered live updates of the Macworld San Francisco Keynote speech to over 100,000 people simultaneously using the latest web technologies.
"By far the best mac keynote coverage I have ever seen. No constant page refreshing. No 'page will update every three minutes' even though they never do. I just let the page update every minute like it was supposed to. It was actually weird to get coverage without some sort of connection failure." - MacRumors member, war
Background
Since February 2000, MacRumors.com has closely followed news and rumors surrounding Apple Computer. Public interest peaks every year at Macworld San Francisco when Apple typically announces its new products. This year's event was highly anticipated due to pervasive rumors that Apple would be releasing their first Intel-based Macintosh.
Each year, MacRumors.com provides live web and IRC updates of the Macworld Keynote speech.
MacRumorsLive
Last summer we introduced a new AJAX-based web update system called MacRumorsLive to handle the increasing interest in Apple's keynote address. The setup (click for details) was designed to offer unlimited scalability and tailored to provide live text updates to a large audience of people. This is accomplished by using the latest web technologies (AJAX) to minimize the amount of data that needs to be sent to each individual viewer.
Prior to this year's Macworld San Francisco Keynote, our preparations were made, and a small test run was completed. Our final configuration consisted of 6 individual servers: four Web/IRC servers, one dedicated IRC server, and one dedicated MySQL server.
The Keynote
On January 10th 2006, we enabled MacRumorsLive at 8:00 am Pacific -- one hour prior to the keynote address. While the traffic that the event attracted was well beyond our expectations, the system held up beautifully. Site visitors reported that many of the other Mac sites also offering Keynote coverage were unresponsive for part or all of the event, while MacRumorsLive remained responsive throughout.Our site was linked to widely across the web, including prominent links from Digg and Slashdot -- two popular technology sites. These links caused no noticable "spike" in our number of visitors, illustrating the magnitude of traffic that MacRumorsLive was already receiving.
The Stats
We peaked at approximately 103,000 simultaneous web visitors and 6,000 IRC viewers during the Keynote speech and transmited over 32 GB of data in a three hour period. If not for the efficiency of the MacRumorsLive AJAX update system, the same webcast would have required approximately twice as many servers and would have had to transfer almost 6 times as much data (196 GB).Here are the stats from the 3 hour window surrounding the Keynote speech:
Totals
| Total Hits | 21,943,524 |
| XML hits | 11,682,030 |
| Pages | 1,444,562 |
| Visits (1) | 271,053 |
| Unique IPs | 174,402 |
| Data transfered | 32GB |
Peaks
| Hits/second (2) | 3,812 |
| IRC users | 6,079 |
| Simultaneous visitors | 109,000 |
| Bandwidth (3) | approx. 77Mbit/sec |
Misc
| Estimated data transfer without AJAX (4) | 196GB |
| Web log size | 4.63GB |
| Average hits/second during keynote (5) | 2,152 |
| Peak hits in a second (6) | 5,089 |
| Hits between 9-10am | 6.9 million |
| Hits between 10-11am | 9.6 million |
Graph
Hits per second from ~8am to ~12:30pm. Average over each minute.
Notes
- First spike at ~10:10am, start of Intel/iMac announcement.
- Second spike at ~10:30am, start of 'one more thing' / MacBook Pro announcement.
- Third spike at ~11:37am, switch from live to mirror mode (where MacRumorsLive.com mirrors the normal MacRumors.com front page).
Summary
The final Macworld Keynote Speech transcription is archived here (click). The live update page polled our servers every 60 seconds to receive the most recent updates.
Delivering live updates to over 100,000 individuals simultaneously was an enormous task both logistically and technologically. We at MacRumors.com are ecstatic with the success of our efforts and plan to provide ongoing coverage for future live Apple events. Our MacRumorsLive system will continue to be tweaked and improved. Thanks to all the visitors and participants who made this possible.
MacRumors.com represents one of the largest Mac communites on the web and will continue to provide timely updates and lively discussions on Apple's current and future plans.
The MacRumorsLive AJAX system was created by Scotland-based developer Equiknox for MacRumors.com and employs hosting services delivered by Tecknohost.
To contact MacRumors.com, email us using this form
- As reported by webalizer.
- Calculated as average over each minute.
- Five minute average from MRTG.
- An estimate of the data that would have been transfered had a meta refresh page with the full layout & 60 second refresh been used
- Covers period 9am - 10:45am.
- The average over a minute is more a realistic measure of load.