On Monday, August 18th, I unleashed the LiveJournal Sitcom meme on the unwitting denizens of LiveJournal. Little did I know how large an impact this would have, at least in the short run. As of this writing, about 91 thousand unique users have used it, and it has sustained nearly 850 thousand hits. What follows is a description of the events immediately following the ljsitcom release, and some other random statistics. My next post will deal with technical meme-design issues, and I'll make the ljsitcom source code available at that point as well.

The seven updates on my previous post detail the trials I went through, in a nutshell, getting this thing to run in a stable manner. I'll recap:

By the middle of the next day, the popularity had begun snowballing, and the webserver's load average was skyrocketing. My website is hosted on an Athlon 800 with 512mb of RAM, which is very low-end in the server market, but had been sufficient for everything it needed to do up to this point (it had been slashdotted a couple times in the past and survived). However, the combination of a semi-computationally-intense script and the growing flood of users was driving it to its knees. Something needed to be done.

My first attempt at stemming the load was to try and optimise the script in any way I could think of. I used Perl's Cache::FileCache module to add local caching of fetched userinfo pages, I tweaked that so it only cached the list of friends instead of the whole page, I condensed some of the code where I could, and I replaced many double-quoted "strings" with single-quoted 'strings' so that variable-interpolation would only be done where needed. These changes had a very barely noticeable effect. I was still worried.

By the end of the day, the webserver was crawling again, so I took the script down overnight while I tried to come up with a solution. My server administrator was beginning to get annoyed with me.

In the morning, I decided that if I set up a cronjob to swap the real script with a placeholder "come back soon" script every three minutes, it'd give the server time to cool off between bursts of usage. In addition, I put up a second instance of the script on my admin's new server machine, a dual Athlon 2GHz with 2GB of memory, and added a "please use this mirror" link to the original script. This worked well for about five hours, when the main server overloaded yet again and the admin asked me to take the script down. I did, sadly. However, shortly afterwards, he agreed that I could try running it exclusively on the new server, as a stress-test. I set up a redirection script in the original script's location, sending people to the new server, and held my breath.

The new server's load stayed fairly low; I don't recall seeing it ever top 8 or 9. Still, I set up the three-minute rotation cronjob again, and from that point on the load stayed around 1 or 2. I was pleased, and watched the hits pour in. By the end of the day, 25,000 unique users had used the script in its new location, each reloading it about 8 times or so. About 7,000 had used it in its original location, bringing the total at that point to 32,000 users.

Over the next couple days, the emails and comments on the original post began flooding in. The script continued to run beautifully, and the server stayed stable. I started working on replying to people. Many of them had good suggestions, but most of all they just wanted to tell me they had enjoyed it. This made me very happy, since the whole point of this sort of thing is to give people some enjoyment, even if its only for a few minutes.

A side-effect of the rampant popularity of ljsitcom was a renaissance for the Pizza Arbiter. After its initial release, it had about 7,000 unique users over a period of a week or two, and then lay nearly dormant for the last month and a half. Since ljsitcom was released, however, the pizza database has increased to over 13,000 users.

There are over 83,000 unique LiveJournal URLs in my website's referer logs. That means that number of different links to corknut.org on LiveJournal pages have been clicked through. If LJ's Meme Tracker was ever updated, ljsitcom's 83,000+ links would most likely be at the top of the list. I'm so proud. :)

A handful of people made small donations as well, which was very heartening. Those donations will most likely go towards mangofandango and my paid accounts, because it seems only fair. Seeing this sort of thing happen gives me even more faith in the future acceptance of micropayments -- if some people are willing to send me a buck or two out of the pure goodness of their hearts, surely more people would be willing to pay a cent or two to use a toy like this, if it was simple and straightforward to do so? That's a discussion for another time, though.

Another wacky side-effect of ljsitcom was encountering some old acquaintances. Three people that I knew in the past have contacted me because they recognised my name on the meme, and it's be fun exchanging notes with those people. I've also been befriended by a bunch of new people because of this.

It's been a crazy ride so far. I'll keep you all updated as things happen. :)

Update (25 Aug 2003 15:59 EDT): LJ finally updated its Meme Tracker -- I guess they update it once a week -- and LJSitcom did indeed make it to the top, but it didn't find all 83,000 links. However, surprisingly, the Pizza Arbiter made its way back onto the list, with two different URLs (one with the www, the other without) both in the top thirty memes. Yay for renewed pizza interest!