Hi all. This is my first, and likely only post. One night in March when I heard about this site on Fox News, I went to the site’s URL only to find it unreachable. Being a technical kind of person (I run an Internet hosting and IP transit company), I looked a little closer as to why the site wasn’t online, and determined that it was either from a Denial of Service attack, or a barage of hits to the site. These are problems I solve for people on a regular basis in my line of work as an Internet hoster and a systems administrator.
I made contact with the site administrator, offered the use of server hardware and the Internet capacity to move the site’s information around the Internet (commonly referred to as “bandwidth”) at no charge. Ever since, I’ve spearheaded the effort to scale the site up to hundreds of thousands of hits per day, being constrained only by my available time. With the contribution of source-code from people across the globe, along with guidance by various peers (among them, someone in Twitter’s operations department), I made daily tweaks and enhancements that ultimately helped this site become the success that it is.
As of April 15, our configuration is comprised of front-end cache servers, backend web servers, and a backend MySQL server. The five caches run virtualized on a dual Woodcrest 5110 machine, as they use only a modicum of resources. They’re caching exclusively to RAM to avoid IO wait. The backend webservers are comprised of three single processor Xeon 5310s and one Core2Quad Q6600 and run lighttpd. The MySQL server is a dual Woodcrest 5110. The utilization on the whole backend cluster has been less than 20% at any time, even during a massive spike to 160 megabits:
RTG graph of actual front-end web traffic for taxdayteaparty.com
Obviously I’ve left out a few key elements here, which I deem to be the “secret sauce” of the whole operation. But you get the general idea. To anyone wishing to duplicate something like this, I would highly advise that you do so on FreeBSD. We used Linux everywhere and quickly ran into OS limitations. I’ve always been a big fan of Linux, but there does not seem to be universal consensus on how to make certain parts of it scale well. FreeBSD is the ultimate for scalability as of version 7, and the only downfall I can see is that it’s limited in the ways you can virtualize it.
Some of the high-end web servers we used on the back-end
I’d like to thank everyone who organized these efforts from the top down. Particularly Eric Odom, who conceived this site, for being the good shepherd and watching over this day and night until it came to fruition. This opportunity has given me a wealth of knowledge, and for that I am grateful. Also to everyone who assisted me with certain scalability issues.
As I mentioned, we donated server and bandwidth resources to this cause, receiving no compensation for them in return. If you’re in the market for Internet hosting or consulting services, please consider using my company, colo4jax LLC, so that we can continue to contribute to the outgrowth of today’s events.
Take care, and may God bless America.
Thanks for doing this! It obviously had to scale up dramatically without big $$.
For the post above - various sources are compiling crowd estimates. Clearly it should go over 500,000. There will be updates as figures are tracked down from the hundreds of protests, since the information is just as widely scattered.
http://www.surgeusa.org/actions/teapartycrowds.htm
Thank you for doing this. I am appreciative of what you and many others are doing for our country.
God Bless you! I will keep the name of your company in mind and pass the information around to friends. Conservatives need to utilize services of true patriots and boycott liberals. I feel the threat to this nation goes beyond liberals but that’s how they got the “foot in the door”. Everyone should google: ( Communist take over congress 1963) as their was a presentation in congress of the goals of communism’s pursuit to take over USA from within. We need to boycott liberal newspapers, actors, mainstream news stations, HBO because of Bill Mayer and contact the advertisers and let them know why we are boycotting their products “because they are advertising on a liberally biased news station”.
This is the adage of a wolf in sheep’s clothing. The sheep being uninformed and mislead people who believed in “hope and change” and the wolf represents the Marxist/Socialist/Collectivist/Federalist/Fascist -whatever “ist” describes it - power and control that is an assault on America’s freedom and economic prosperity! God Bless America!
Write, call, email, Congress, Governors, politicians, news sources…don’t let the fervor die!
Note: This is the patriot who enabled http://taxdayteaparty.com to work: “we donated server and bandwidth resources to this cause, receiving no compensation for them in return. If you’re in the market for Internet hosting or consulting services, please consider using my company, colo4jax LLC, so that we can continue to contribute to the outgrowth of today’s events.”
Since all this began I am sure many sites on the national front faced similar problems. And beyond them I have seen many local sites moved from a one page blurb of their event to multi-page dynamic content sites with their own .net .org .us ect.
And anyone can only conclude that there had to be many, many people like Ray who stepped up and said I have a server you can host on. Or said I can make your site better and get more traffic to it. Or said here’s the money to get it done right.
The greater story in all the Tea Parties is in the little behind the scenes details that had to be done by yet unnamed people who brought their individual skill sets to the table. And I am not just talking about tech skils. We have all seen all the t-shirts and bumper stickers. And having helped organize one locally, what about the guy that had to lineup speakers, or even the speakers spending hours writing, rewriting and rehearsing there speeches. Then there is person that had to line up and setup audio equipment. And someone had to get permission to gathering at the various locations. And I am sure the list goes on.
I say there is standing ovation in order for all the unname people that made all these thousands of tea parties happen, and allowed so many of us to have a voice.
Just knowing how conservatives think and their work ethic and selfless sacrifice I can see why we can organize a massive national event in a mater of weeks that can dwarf any liberal events that had a year of planning.
Ray, congratulations. That’s some seriously good tech work.
We’ve got web app building experience and are kicking around the idea of building a custom app to help organize the Tea Party movement. We’d love to talk to you further about it.
This is what America is all about. You see a need and you pitch in. Thanks for all your work. You are appreciated.
Has anyone tried to total up the number of Tea Party participants nationwide? Gotta be at least 500,000 from what I’ve read so far. http://www.shirts4freedom.com
good job! and thanks!
Great job need more things just like this .Goverment is out of control we need to stop them.
Awesome work. Thanks for your efforts.
Thanks all!
I wondered who was takin’ care of business! You’re my hero!
Wow. Thank you so much for your dedication, special sauce and all the time you committed to helping out. I visited here often and needed the info. You are much appreciated!
Excellent work Ray. I know first hand the effort you put into this. Everything came together very nicely!