June 2nd, 2007
30th ... err ... 24th of may
It was planned to be the 30th, but in the end everything was a week earlier. The great rush of many fans to nightwish.com in order to see the band’s new voice. It all started on 23th with the leaking of Nightwish’s new single “Eva” on some online music stores. The desicion to release all information the next day was made only a few hours later. There was only one problem: the server wasn’t already prepared for this. Thanks to the fast responses of Nebula and Hetzner we could set up three more servers and mirror the page on them. I was using pound to load balance the three servers at Hetzner. Nebula’s server was added via Round Robin DNS. Everything worked fine until we released the news … pound simply crashed and blocked port 80 completly. It might have been my own fault but well … it was impossible to use it. After one hour of investigations it simply shut pound down. And simply started lighttpd … surprisingly (or maybe, not really?) it handled all the requests without any problem! We had up to 600 requests per second. On Nebula’s we even had up to 2400 rq/s during my investigations on the load balancer. After this one I’m officially a fan of lighttpd! :-)
