Mondays are always our biggest day on the site but this week we beat our previous traffic high by a mile. We received 64,000 absolute unique vistors, and 93,000 visits on a single day! That’s more than pass through the turnstiles at a packed Wembley Stadium! We attribute this to exam fever kicking in across the nation.
The exam period brings new challenges for our moderator team. Obviously people like to come to TSR to talk about their experiences but if you want to talk about an exam that some people haven’t sat yet there is a problem. Or if you want to talk in too much detail about a closed paper that again is an issue. We have a pretty close relationship with a number of exam boards including OCR and Edexcel who occasionally drop us an email or pick up the phone to bring our attention to a thread on the site that is going into an unacceptable level of detail.
Use your head when posting information regarding specific exams. Do read the posting guidelines issued at the top of threads and forums by the Moderators. As I say exam boards do check the site and they take these issues very very seriously. It isn’t worth getting into trouble over and you could jepardise your own results if the exam board choose to follow up their enquiries seriously.
To quote the person I spoke to at Edexcel the other week:
“The only way for candidates to be absolutely sure that they are not breaching examination regulations is to avoid any discussion at all once they have seen the secure question paper.”
Good luck with your exams if you are sweating them out at the moment!
The site coped pretty well with this much volume due to the excellent optimisation work that’s been done by our developers over the past few months. However we all agreed that we’d got to a point where it was time for another hardware upgrade especially with even higher volume days expected later in the year around exam results time.
So on tuesday evening we added a second database server. This is now helping spread the load of constant database queries which are made for example when writing, replying and editing posts etc. We hope you are finding the site really responsive now, we’ve had some good feedback to suggest you all are. 
This brings the number of servers behind TSR to a whopping 8:
* 4 Web servers
* 1 Load balancer
* 2 Database servers
* 1 Index server
You can see what these machines look like and where The Student Room physically lives by following this link: http://www.gossamer-threads.com/blog/the-data-centre-behind-gossamer-host/#more-57
I’ve been there its VERY cool!!!
We’ve been organising the official 2008 mod meet which is to be held in London this Saturday and Sunday. It’s something we organise every year to thank our Mods for their hard work and to sit down with them to discuss the continual evolution of TSR. We have some fun stuff planned and will definitely post updates on the goings on of the weekend.
Because summer is looming and with it BBQs, my favorite avatar of the week is: becky.fm’s: http://www.thestudentroom.co.uk/member.php?u=65940
- J
