On January 9th, 2007, MacRumors delivered live updates of the Macworld San Francisco 2007 keynote speech given by Steve Jobs. Since no live Quicktime stream was made available, Apple fans had to rely on live web updates to follow the action. This year, we successfully incorporated near real-time photos into our keynote transcription.
After analyzing our logs files (22.4GB), we've posted a detailed summary of the MacRumorsLive system and the traffic it was able to serve.
In short, we peaked at over 213,000 simultaneous web visitors during the keynote and delivered over 408GB of data during the time surrounding the keynote event. This represents twice as many visitors as last year's keynote event. If not for the efficiency of the MacRumorsLive webcast system, the same webcast would have generated almost 1 terabyte of data in the same short window of time.
In order to deliver near-real time photos, we had to temporarily expand our resources and incorporated Cachefly's content delivery system, Amazon's Simple Storage Service, and Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud Service.
The final archive of the keynote transcript remains available.