Free Software Hulk-Smashes Traffic Spike

When I did my periodic glance at Google Analytics for GeoPortal, I was not expecting that.

Traffic to that site is generally a predictable sine wave, slightly swelling during the week and slighting receeding on the weekends, with a monthly average of ~10-12k people (absolute unique IP’s) per month. Having been around the block a few times, I went to the Charlotte Observer web site to see what got linked to GeoPortal and why. In this case it was recycling pickup day changes.

Had I not checked the web stats, I never would have known anything was going on. It isn’t just that nothing went wrong during the traffic surge. It’s that the whole event was marked with a deep and profound nothingness. Nothing even slowed down. The whole software stack reeked of thank you sir, may I have another?

I raise a glass to the free software that turned this traffic spike into a non-event: PostgreSQL, PostGIS, and GeoServer. Best in class software, period.