The terror attacks in London resulted in people checking news websites in their millions, trying to find out more about what was going on, many concerned for friends and relatives. From BBC News:I personally witnessed the BBC News website failing to load, along with a connection error to the Reuters website. Even blogs and community forums were experiencing heavy traffic as members and readers gathered together to share what information they knew, our own thread following the tragic events having received some 8,000 reads.Keynote Systems, which monitors traffic on net backbones and to top sites, said that visitors to news sites surged for a five-hour period on Thursday morning as details the attacks in London emerged.
It said that the download times for webpages on some of the UK's main news sites were eight times longer than normal.
In some cases pages took about 18 seconds to download and a quarter of requests did not get through.
Fortunately, while many sites were slowed by the surge in traffic, most remained available throughout Thursday.


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We have a sereis of normal page templates (~85K w/ ~75 elements) and a series of light templates (~50K w/ ~25 elements). I had a half-finished CSSp ultra-light version which myself and another coder rush-finished and updated, which was ~20K w/ ~5 inline elements. We also removed a lot of the content so we could post more relevant info, and we removed all associated back-end process like link-tracking and cookie reading code. That fixed the issues for the most part but we were receiving an absolutely mental number of hits, which worsened when the peeps in the US started waking up (or being woken up). Fortunately the periods of extreme load where requests were failing, and we had to switch down to the lighter and ultra-light versions were relativel short (in the order of 10-15 mins). We never actually got 'brought down' by the number of requests, which was releiving.
