The impossible dream

We were once asked to create a site that would hit X million hits in X days. That's right. X million hits in just a few days. (Don't want to put the exact number because our client might see this and get mad. Hahaha.)

It seemed proposterous at the time but I guess it is possible!

The Site With 8.64 Trillion Hits in One Day

BY CHRIS DANNENMon May 18, 2009 at 12:59 PM

The day before India's Lok Sabha elections, the country's election commission made a new Web site live to provide election results in real-time. The commisson overbuilt the site, so it thought, readying it for almost 3,000 hits per second--that's 80.6 billion hits in a single 8-hour day. (Below, a supporter of India's victorious Congress party.)

The six-day voting process was supposed to culminate on Saturday, May 16, but the servers were crashing, and updating stopped. TV channels and newspapers that had been counting on the site's accuracy were flailing. The servers, which live at India's National Informatics Centre, couldn't be fixed until early Sunday morning. The final hit-count: 8.64 trillion hits in just eight hours, far more than top-visited sites like Google, that gets only 5,300 visits per second, or 460 million per day. You can view the results of the elections here.

[Original article here.]