I hope you’ll excuse me if I don’t have much to talk about this morning - other than yestday’s AFC Championship of course. The Colts franchise is going to its first Super Bowl in 36 years, thanks to a dramatic come from behind victory over the Patriots.
We were there to the sweet finish, and lingered well afterward, mingling amongt the players and their families down on the field. It was a rare moment. Everybody in the building hugging and high-fiving. There’s nothing quite like a major sports victory to erase the differences between people. It didn’t matter that I’d never met them before…last night I was fast friends with every one of the 57,000 Colts fans in attendance at the RCA Dome. I wish I had brought my camera so I could post a photo here.
Anyway, back to business
So the Colts are going to the Super Bowl. What does that mean to the Web site? Well, if yesterday is any indication, we better get our caching situation worked out. Our site was overwhelmed by traffic after the game. In fact, I got an E mail as I was standing on the field celebrating that the site was down, buried under and avalanche of traffic. I checked out the site several hours before the game and it was already running slowly under increased strain. I can see from Omniture that we were running at approximately 17,000 unique visitors and 500,000 page views per hour. I don’t know what that means to our system. Apparently the victory pushed a lot of people to visit our site, and our scheme to handle that expected traffic didn’t quite hold up. I’m not the technical guy, so I’ll have to wait until later to hear exactly what happened and what we can do to solve the problem. Traffic is only going up from here over the next two weeks.
I know the site is working this morning because I just checked it. It says the Colts are going to the Superbowl. So I didn’t dream it!!
Congratulations! This is a dream Super Bowl for me. I’ve been a Bears fan since ‘75 and a Colts fan since Jeff George. A number of us considered the Colts to be Chicago South. It’s the one game I go out of my way to see in person, if at all possible. Yesterday couldn’t have gone any better.
I’ll be at a party surrounded by Colts fans in two weeks, but there isn’t a losing scenario for me on Feb. 4th (unless I don’t get to see the game at all … Any chance it will be pre-empted by Heidi?)