Hey! Over here…Yeah… F-r-a-n-c-e.

Every morning, over coffee and computer, taking care not to spill one on the other, I read the Guardian, the IHT, Le Monde and then I turn to Reddit.com, aka, “What’s new online?”. At Reddit, the ‘community’ posts web pages that they like and other visitors vote on these articles if they are interesting or well-received. With enough votes, a website can make it to the very first page of Reddit, which lists the most popular 25 URLs (out of I don’t know how many candidates. Hundreds? Thousands?).

The first page of Reddit is presumably the best of the best and getting your content on it is supposed to be what Web 2.0 marketing is all about.

I was meditating on all this on day before yesterday, Friday afternoon, when I had a wonderful idea. For laughs, I would post one of my own blog entries to Reddit, see what happens. I mean, I get 20-30 visits a day, mostly from curious (and/or loyal) friends, but wouldn’t it be better for the world if more people read my bons mots? What if Reddit really works???

I chose The Official French Business Calender, which I had written in August, to nominate. As the holiday seasons approaches, I had had the thought that the Calendar was On Topic again for a few weeks. If you read it, I think you’ll understand. (And anyway. I didn’t have anything totally up to date to propose )

Anyhow, I post the Calendar at around 15h Central European Time and an hour and a half later my son, who manages the server where this blog lives, calls me to ask me “WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?”. He says it with a twinkle in his voice, laughing even, but the undertone of server administrator panic was there too. Turns out my article had made it to the first page of Reddit with extreme rapidity, and the result was that the MySQL database that this blog uses was getting 150 requests a second, which is about 400 million times more than it had ever received before.

150 requests a second is not a lot for MySQL, but there must have been something wrong with the way I had installed WordPress, because, for the first time ever, the Reddit rush brought our web server to its knees.

At 17h, we were obliged to a) take my blog offline and b) take off my posting on Reddit, which fortunately is possible. About 1 hour later, the rush slowed down, (3200 visits were logged in that first hour) but we kept my blog offline overnight, just in case. We all had better things to do on a Friday night than sit up with a sick web server.

Saturday morning, I looked around the web and found the excellent Wordpress Cache plugin, which I promptly installed. WP-cache creates static versions of popular blog entries, bypassing MySQL, so that it doesn’t overheat when the Reddit Effect hits. It seems to have solved the problem.

Today is Sunday, all is well, and I find myself wondering if I should repost the Calendar to Reddit. Nah, I think I’ll wait.