As I'm sure you all know, a new version of the single board computer from the Raspberry Pi Foundation was announced on Monday February 2. We here at element14 are proud of our continued partnership with the Foundation and were happy to once again be part of the big announcement, and be one of the two primary distributors selling the Raspberry Pi.
This isn't our first rodeo - we've supported all of the previous Raspberry Pi launches before. So, for weeks in advance we worked with our IT teams trying to get our servers and site ready for a large influx of traffic that morning. We prepared for the level of interest we expected to see...but your enthusiasm was greater than our expectations!
We saw traffic levels exceed 5x our normal levels within the first hour of launch, and by the time the US came online, our servers were having a tough time keeping up.
Below is a shot of one of our monitoring graphs from one of our app servers during the launch - the chart doesn't even go high enough to show the top of the spike
We used social media to keep people posted on the status of the Community's availability:
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Rest assured that we were not sitting idle during these issues. By the end of the day we'd made some major improvements in our load balancing, upped our web server capacity, and added a brand new app server to help keep up with the load.
By Tuesday things were a little better, and we've continued making tweaks and addressing some issue members have been kind enough to report through social media and our Feedback & Support area.
We appreciate that you came back even if we weren't available to serve you on your first attempt last week. We keep working to make the element14 Community a better and more robust site with your feedback.
Thank you for your continued support - and keep that feedback coming!
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