Hurricane Sandy and RadioReference/Broadcastify Traffic

[blantonl]

Here are some stats from a record breaking day yesterday on RadioReference.com / Broadcastify.

We eclipsed our previous record of 47K online listeners with 62K online listeners on 10/29/2012 at about 9:30 PM CST. The previous record was set on New Years Day 2012 at around midnight.

Additionally, each of the following feeds qualified for a feed provider incentive ranging from $50 to $200, totaling $600. We will be contacting each of those providers to get them their incentives issued.

+-----------+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| listeners | Feed Description                                                            |
+-----------+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
|      6846 | FDNY Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens, and Staten Island                  | 
|      3547 | FDNY Manhattan Fire Dispatch                                                | 
|      3216 | Brooklyn Fire and Hatzolah EMS Dispatch                                     | 
|      2518 | Atlantic County and City Fire/EMS                                           | 
|      2166 | NYPD Manhattan 1st, 5th, and 7th Pcts                                       | 
|      1999 | Atlantic City Police, Fire, and EMS                                         | 
|      1753 | National Hurricane Center Skywarn Nets - Echolink Node 7203, IRLP Node 9129 | 
+-----------+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+

As for traffic, we also saw record page hits and visits. Here are some of the stats for Oct 29th, 2012

239,328 unique people visited the site, generating...
1,465,282 page views

During the afternoon and evening, we launched an additional 4 Web servers to complement the existing normal 3, and launched an additional slave database server to cover database read requests. We also launched an additional memcache cluster for caching purposes, and we throttled connections at the proxy to prevent serious bursts of traffic from overwhelming everything. Social media can drive enormous amounts of traffic to a site in a very short period so throttling connections helps keep the site up and running while additional resources can be provisioned.

Hope this gives some insight into yesterday.

Warm regards,

Lindsay

[trsundstrom]

Wirelessly posted (Moto Droid Bionic: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_6_3; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.16 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0 Safari/533.16)

Good job! IT ain't easy.

[KD2DLL]

Those numbers are AMAZING! Spent hours listening yesterday. Thank you for all your efforts to keep everything up and running!

[blantonl]

Tomorrow we'll run reports to see if any additional feeds from midnight CST today (10/30) also qualified for incentives. There might be a few...

[blantonl]

Additional notes.

On 10/28/2012 at 10:30 PM CST, we reached a new record for feeds online, 3361.

On 10/29/2012 at 8:00 AM CST we had 3338 feeds online.

On 10/29/2012 at 5:00 PM CST we had 3130 feeds online.

On 10/29/2012 at 7:00 PM CST we had 3096 feeds online

This morning (10/30/2012) at 6:30 AM CST we had 2950 feeds online

RIght now, as of this post (10/30/2012) at 6:33 PM CST we have 3076 feeds online.

We lost at least 400 feeds during the storm.... That really shows the impact on feed providers and the Northeast in general from this storm and the flooding/power outages. We are also seeing the recovery....

[KD2DLL]

Originally Posted by blantonl

We lost at least 400 feeds during the storm.... That really shows the impact on feed providers and the Northeast in general from this storm and the flooding/power outages. We are also seeing the recovery....

Although there are more feed providers that are impacted but are running the feed in other ways such as generators and battery back up. I'm sure there would be quite a few more down. Curious to see how log it takes to get most of the feeds back up and running. Hopefully all or most of them will be able to be back up again!

[Bote]

I'd bet a healthy percentage of the feed outages were the result of their Internet connections going down.

DSL and cable Internet providers like to quote figures like 8 hours, but that's assuming the backup batteries serving the equipment in your neighborhood are brand new, charged properly, and well maintained. Good luck.

[stevenwells]

I think you guys did a OUTSTANDING JOB!!!!!

[georgesharpe]

Awesone! It was scary listening to Atlantic City as it was being washed away! It makes one thankful to live in an area where almost no bad weather ever exists.

[krokus]

I was listening to the fire dispatch for the fire company I used to be with. That feed went down at some point. (In eastern PA, near Philly.)

[mjbjr]

"During the afternoon and evening, we launched an additional 4 Web servers to complement the existing normal 3, and launched an additional slave database server to cover database read requests. We also launched an additional memcache cluster for caching purposes, and we throttled connections at the proxy to prevent serious bursts of traffic from overwhelming everything. Social media can drive enormous amounts of traffic to a site in a very short period so throttling connections helps keep the site up and running while additional resources can be provisioned."

Is that english? lol

[One13Truck]

Originally Posted by krokus

I was listening to the fire dispatch for the fire company I used to be with. That feed went down at some point. (In eastern PA, near Philly.)

I'm seeing those feeds in that area that went down slowly popping back online. Still pretty widespread power outages in that area from what I hear so I guess it'll take a while. I was much luckier here. The power blipped a few times but never went out completely. Heck my department only banged out 3 fire calls during the storm. 2 for wires down and 1 tree down and that was IT. I figured we'd be running all night. Not that I'm complaining.


And I also agree. Great work by everybody on the RR side to keep things going and to all those providing feeds in the areas hardest hit to keep things going as much as possible as well. It was very sad to listen in to some of the places I love and hearing what was happening to them.

[BadMango]

While I did notice a few website slowdowns Monday night, the streaming service itself performed without a single interruption. Fantastic work by the RR/Broadcastify team! I even found one guy listening to my feed from India. Pretty damn cool.

Some important feeds did go down in my area (like SOD and Traffic). Fortunately, the power outages were scattered here, so enough feeds remained online that people could still get a clear picture of the situation.

I think this service really came into its own during the storm. Many people tuned in to hear events unfolding as they happened, minutes and even hours before news outlets reported on them (such as, in NYC, the explosion at a Con Edison substation, or flooding at Bellevue and NYU hospitals).

With the Broadcastify platform maturing and gaining visibility, I think future incidents will draw even more listeners.

[KD2DLL]

As of right now at 10:11 PM Eastern, I saw there are 3,150 feeds online
Like Lindsay said, on 10/31/12 at 6:30 AM CSt, there were 2950 feeds online.

200 feeds back up. Half of the feeds that went down are back online. Thats great news.

Lindsay, hopefully you don't mind me posting this, just figured it would be good to show the comeback so far.

[scottyhetzel]

Makes you think...everyone needs back up power systems to stay connected....all central offices have battery back ups.. So dial will continue and I.T. .Good job RR. Nice to know people can hear true life lines and some people could actually help others on their worst day of their lives. Kudos to all feed providers !

[IdleMonitor]

I was quite impressed with the # of 62,000 plus people listening to the feeds at prime time. Wonder how many were mobile phone users or tablet users with internet.

[pratzert]

I was too busy to try it out, plus I lost power had internet service.

I missed out on some of the best listening in years.

Oh Well....

Thanks.

[pddispatcher]

How does one qualify for an incentive?

[pathalogical]

Was this from that appliance that was set up some time ago ?

Update on NYC Feed Appliance

[Spitfire8520]

Originally Posted by pddispatcher

How does one qualify for an incentive?

Feed Provider Incentives - The RadioReference Wiki

Basically you need a massive natural disaster or event to occur that thousands of people will listen to. So essentially something bad has to happen in your area.