Visitors over time

This graph shows the number of visitors in 10 minute periods over the dates 20-21 January 2006 when the ahhhhhh page was on dig.

The page was submitted at about 10:06 GMT. There was a very low level of activity (one hit a minute or less) until it was promoted to the front page. The first hit from the digg home page was at 20:51:46 GMT and this coincides with the beginning of the large peak. The transitions to the home page and then to page 2 are marked by red lines on the graph. The times were determined by the first hit with the appropriate referrer, and so the real time could be earlier. It is almost certainly a matter of seconds, rather than minutes however.

• The blue bars are the number of page hits to the ahhhhhh page itself in a particular 10 minute interval.
• The red lines are approximate indications of when the story moved between the main pages on digg. The most interesting part is the first two red lines, which show when it was on the front page. Most of the hits ocurred then.
• The graph is in html and looks better on browsers that support non-integral percentage widths.
• Although the number of hits is not particularly large, the file is over 600k in size, so I estimate that there was over 10Mbit per second at the peak. I don't know what effect it had on the server since I didn't observe the peak

I was at the pub when it hit the front page, so I missed most of this. Typical.