if you can't get on ao3 tonight it's because a minecraft streamer rpf fic just updated and all 41k of the authors twitter followers tried to read it at once and yes if reading this confused you it means you're officially old
you all honest to god have no idea but minecraft rpf IS the biggest fandom right now. most of these people and certainly the people this story is about had no or very little engagement before last year but suddenly millions of american children who 1) love minecraft, 2) are growing up on streaming, 3) have never heard of fandom before, had nothing to do for a full year but sit at home and watch these guys stream. dream, who is a 21 year old streamer who has never shown his face, gained 15 million subs this year. fans of this genre are avid, skew very young, and, as mentioned, have probably never read another fic. the author's twitter replies are full of young teens explaining to each other what ao3 is and how to make an account there just to read this fic. we have wild times ahead. anyway, if this post really confused you, that's what's going on.
Not to begrudge anyone their fun, but we work really hard on making sure our servers don't keel over even during stressful times, and it would be a pretty bad sign if a single fandom, let alone a single work, managed to bring the whole website to its knees. Luckily, it didn't!
(We even said so at the time, even though a screenshot of that tweet didn't make it into the post above.)
To give you a sense of how much traffic the AO3 servers can handle, we saw a total of 65.6 million page views on Sunday, January 3rd, which was a new record. That's an average of 2.73 million pages served every hour (more at peak times, less when a majority of users are asleep), or 45,555 pages per minute, or 759 pages per second. This level of fannish activity did not crash our volunteer-maintained servers, and we're actually kind of proud of that accomplishment!
The day of the downtime, we had a total of 62 million page views, which was still a bit more than we saw over the December holidays. And while a new chapter on a popular fic did not manage to kill the Archive for three hours, we are still working on optimizing things to prevent an unlucky repeat of that downtime in the future. Please help us out by not spreading admittedly funny rumors, if you'd be so kind!
