So when I’m not working, blogging, or slacking off, I do development work at Neowin. I mostly prefer to work on making the new toys (who doesn’t?), but a few days ago I had a chance to test our site under the most traffic it has gotten in a long time.

During Wednesday afternoon, Neowin hit the homepage of Reddit and Digg. Now while this wasn’t the first time our site has been on the homepage of a social website, it is one of the first times that our forums, powered by IP.Board, was the focus of the traffic. While our main homepage has stood up to this kind of traffic before, we were unsure how the forums would handle it.

It actually didn’t turn out that great.

As soon as the forums started to see around (estimated) 10,000 users at a single time, the site crippled and neither the regular visitors or the new ones from Digg and Reddit could view the content they wanted to see. This was due allegedly to the MySQL server being abused by the thousands of queries being requested by it every second.

As a result we decided to take down the forums and put up a static page that linked to the content (images) that the visitors from the social sites wanted to see. The parts of the site that were still online instantly came to life again, but now members in our IRC chat were starting to become frustrated about the forums being shut down.

At that time I decided to make it so only traffic to the specific topic would result in a static page so everybody would be able to get what they want. It took only a couple of seconds to modify the code and we had the forums back online and the social website viewers were still getting their static page that used a total of zero queries!

We left things alone for a while as the traffic wouldn’t be going away for a while — it was on Digg’s front page for hours. Once and a while we would take our static page off to see if the forums could handle the traffic again, but we watched as the site was slowly crippled again.

During this time a post was published to our front page discussing the incident and also linking to the images that were of interest to our new visitors. We decided to see what would happen to our server if we directed all the social website traffic to this article on the front page. So with a few quick code changes, all the social website traffic was now diverted to our front page code system (a completely internal project to Neowin). What was the result? Our servers survived. We watched as the strain jumped on our servers due to increased load of all the various images, files, and queries being requested by the thousands of visitors. Did we buckle under the load? Not once.

So while we’re now looking into plans to prevent such a crippling action on our forums, it’s good to know that our front page can handle whatever is dished out to it.

Neowin: Worst hard drive crash I’ve seen

Digg: Worst hard drive crash ever [pics]
Reddit: Worst hard drive crash I’ve seen [Pics]

Trixbox, built on the Asterisk PBX system, is a great VoIP solution for a variety of people. For the casual user it can help you manage your calls by either routing based on the time of day or forwarding a call from your home phone to you cell phone to keep that conversation going without having to hang up and call again. For the business user it can help you route calls between various departments and keep track of average call statistics.

Whatever type of user you are, you can agree that automated unsolicited calls are best left away from your telephone number. With a simple Trixbox server, you can accomplish this.

With some basic used equipment or a cheap new system, FXO card, VoIP adapter for your phone, and a few MP3s, you can setup a system that will trick the autodialer to think someone picked up the phone. By the time the person on the other side picks up their phone to begin the sales speech, they are listening to your music on hold while your actual phone rings. This will most likely confuse the caller and they will hang up. I have personally tested this on a user who normally receives many unsolicited calls, and their unwanted calls dropped dramatically. Sometimes a few rings got through, but the calling party usually hung up before you ever had a chance to look at the caller ID.

Once you have your system setup, you can easily expand it to provide more features, more phones, and even handle more calls. As an example: Say your child is talking to their friend on the phone, but you need to make a call out and don’t want to use your cell phone. Well if you setup service with an online phone service, you can have outgoing calls route over it if your main line is busy. You could have it also route calls in to your residence, but you would also have to invest in a monthly telephone number.

Product Links:

• Trixbox CE (Trixbox.org)
• FXO Card (X100P.com)
• Barebone Computers (Newegg.com)
• Linksys PAP2 VoIP Adapter (Amazon.com)

Support Links:

• Trixbox without Tears (Install Guide)
• Nerd Vittles (Tips and tricks)

So right now there is the big news that Microsoft (MSFT) wants to buy out Yahoo (YHOO) for an unthinkable about of money. While this unholy alliance of power could tip the balance of power scales in favor of Microsoft over Google, what would become of services such as Flickr? I, along with various friends and family, rely on Flickr for off-site storage and sharing memories with each-other.

So if the merger happened, how bad could it be? Here are some possible outcomes:

• Nothing. Microsoft lets Yahoo run as they are. No end user impact.
• Login services are merged with Microsoft’s Live service and we all have to change our Flickr usernames (again).
• Yahoo is absorbed into Microsoft completely. All search, mail, and identity services become Microsoft. Yahoo Mail gets a Live Maul UI, IM services inter-operate with Live Messenger, Search functions merge into Live Search, and Flickr becomes Live Images (!).

Whatever the outcome is to this event that had all the local news channels running endless looping “reports” about Microsoft’s bid, Flickr better be left alone.