I want to say a few things for my own benefit. Maybe that's the only thing I do here. As always, I hope something I have is useful to someone else. In this case, if you're in any position to deal with a big surge on a small site, you might get something useful, or at least enjoy, what I have to from my experience getting a bump from some guy named Mike Arrington with a little blog called TechCrunch. This is about reaction and what was the right and wrong way to react to the impact of a weeks traffic in a couple hours. Should natural means have brought our typical traffic to these levels (time will bring this) the means to handle it on a day to day basis would have been put in place. The sudden increase began to timeout our FastCGI processes and this was alerted to me quickly. I confirmed this and my first response was to initiate a restart cycle, restarting each process in turn, which did nothing to help. I brought up a new instance on EC2 and prepared to roll it out as a new p...