Topic: Is the forum prepared for heavy traffic? (Read 427 times)

I don't think that any plausible amount of real traffic would typically cause issues. When you've seen the forum falter under DDoS attacks, that's the result of over 100x more traffic than usual, typically coming in a particularly inconvenient (ie. unlike-real-traffic) pattern.

Neither the virus, nor any plausible economic downturn, nor any plausible drop/rise in BTC price will cause the forum to stop functioning long-term.

For the forum to have serious problems due to high traffic, it is necessary to increase the number of visits several times.

I think that in times of falling markets and financial instability people think less and less about investing in bitcoin. Therefore, you should not expect this amount of traffic to increase at the moment.

It looks hypothetical to me why you think that the forum will see a hoard of new people, because in most cases, the jobs are getting continued through homes of different companies' workers and they are not just given holidays and/or removed from their jobs. Nonetheless, I don't think it's going to continue for a very long time and people will not get a lot more time to learn about how to earn online (which Bitcointalk is a big part of).

I agree with DdmrDdmr that the forum traffic is decreasing. I've noticed less posts were being made in the General Discussion board during the past two days. Gravitates me towards Meta in those occasions.


So if the forums traffic is nowhere near it's all time high, it should well be able to handle any increase of traffic from people who have to stay home from work. I bet they didn't reduce their server count after those events you mentioned above so that will make for a lot of unused network connectivity.


Notice how in your graph that January 2020, when bitcoin almost hit $10000, had a much higher alexa ranking than today. I wonder what kind of topics in which boards were all the surplus users were viewing at the time.


You mean binge-watched everything they want to see. Human desire to watch more interesting and entertaining stuff can't be satiated. On the other hand I haven't seen anybody binge-watch bitcointalk threads (yet), and if there were any, they would have used the "All" button, which is DDoS-protected by Cloudflare, to see all the replies anyway. Still, the rest of the site may have a DDoS weakness, but I haven't heard of anyone attempting one, yet.


I know I'm wandering off-topic at this point, but trying to get everyone in developing countries to watch netflix shows is a far cry if most ISPs don't offer connections that can't even stream 720p stably. And that's unlimited data caps, not some metered 4G/LTE that the vast majority of africans, and I guess asians too, are using, TV shows will run out of internet too quickly although that's probably a non-issue since the majority of them are watching some 360p Youtube videos. Regarding their money-losing situation, they can't even hold out the programs they licensed from other media companies since they are launching their own streaming platforms and will take away the rights from Netflix to stream them, thus losing them more money.

@hilarious, I found a list of Amazon Prime 4K shows/movies at https://hd-report.com/list-of-4k-ultra-hd-movies-tv-shows-titles-on-amazon-video/.

Having internet access is not the same as having access to forum infrastructure if it is separate from his house and/or if he keeps whatever he needs to access the infrastructure off site.

Also if he is sick, he may go to a hospital if he gets worse. I obviously don’t wish that on him or anyone, but I am also aware of the risk of that happening.

That's some scary-ass quarantine without internet access. I wonder how theymos managed to sneak that one post out, maybe bribed a guard with some TP.

I would not be worried about CFs ability to handle additional capacity. I would be more worried about the forum’s servers being able to handle the additional demand, however the privacy policy implies cloud services (such as, or similar to AWS) and they are very scalable.

Theymos recently posted that he had symptoms of coronavirus, but says he is feeling better, so it is possible he is under quarantine orders, or is staying home to avoid infecting others even if not ordered to do so. If the capacity to handle traffic is needing to be increased, Cyrus may need to handle it.

The traffic was slightly higher during the yob*t/forum campaign, and the chart vividly shows us that, after the end of that campaign, traffic sank sharply. There is no doubt that with the introduction of a merit system&long crypto winter many members left the forum, and those new members largely failed to advance in ranks, which further demotivated them to stay on forum. Money is the biggest motivator for most people, so I think we are safe from any increase in traffic, regardless of the current situation in the world.

Must be nice to work and browse at the same time without the boss/ senior peeking over your shoulders

Is your country under a lockdown now?

Maybe the self-isolating masses won't have much of an impact, then. 

I suppose our subpopulation of bounty spammers are largely basement-dwellers who never leave the house anyway, heh.  No real change for them.   

I'm sure it will be fine. It's ddos attacks that you need to be worried about, not the cornoavirus.


Blows my mind how business like Netflix stay afloat. They pump so much money into getting the rights to programs and creating their own original content that they're losing massive amounts of money. I think they're just hoping that eventually pretty much every household in the developing world will have a Netflix account and they'll be rolling in the cash but that probably won't happen, especially with all the competition that's around and also up and coming. Netflix is good value for money but most people I know just share their mates or family member's account.


Split the cost between some friends. I'm sure you could find some people on here that would do it. I've just got a new 4k TV so might upgrade to their premium service that has 4k content but only if it's got a lot of stuff. Not sure what they have yet without upgrading.

The forum currently has 45k posts per week. A year and a half ago, that was 6 times more. Many of those were just bounty spammers, so all they did was post (they don't read much and thus don't load many pages).

If Cloudflare would have a problem with that it'll be because of total data on all sites, not just Bitcointalk. Yesterday, the first day everyone here works from home, there were already reports of more than usual data traffic in the country, but they can still handle it. Just a forum isn't that interesting in terms of data compared to streaming video.

Traffic on the forum seems to be moving in the opposite direction really, decreasing rather than increasing, be it to the drop in BTC price or the Coronavirus situation (I presume the latter has more weight now). People prioritize their time in a different manner, and there is a change of habits within the day for many, leading for the forum to seem way quieter these days that usual.

In the short term, I’d say the odds (being low as they may be) are that there is a higher chance of there being some sort of issue with the infrastructure (telecommunications, systems, servers), that may take longer to resolve than usual due to confinement (depending on where), than due to an abrupt surge in connections.

As others have implied, traffic is more likely to increase as the price adopts a hockey stick rise.

If we see the last one-year traffic chart, we can see recently bitcointalk has very little traffic. and still decreasing traffic.


In this chart more traffic shows in July 2019 when bitcoin was very bullish. That means in 2017 this site faced more traffic than today. So nothing has thinking about traffic now until the bullish start again. So I think this site will not face any problem 3-4X traffic will come in the future.

I really don't have the data to prove this, but as far as I know Bitcointalk's traffic was a lot higher in Q3 and Q4 of 2017(at the height of the bubble) compared to now, and Bitcointalk did fine in those times peak times; especially when we didn't have the merit  feature hence there were a lot more spammers back then. Probably safe to assume that Bitcointalk is going to be fine.

Did the forum work well when we had the 2013 online users peak number? Because if it did or if servers were upgraded since then to support an even larger number of activity, then it should all be fine now.

Most users were active back then because that's when most of us have heard of BTC's existence.

Now many have left the space and I believe it's because most of the users were only active here because of the continuous spread of FOMO.. which lead to people believing in non-achievable Bitcoin prices.. which lead to disappointment and then leaving the space.

We should worry when we see the number of online users passing 2-3k most of the time

Yeah, it would definitely be a different situation if bitcoin was soaring and people were stuck indoors.  There might be more current members posting because of that, but I'm pretty sure the forum can handle that.

I can't stand television shows, but I do love movies.  Unfortunately most are mediocre at best, and I think I've watched all the good ones on Amazon.  I probably should check out what Netflix has to offer, but I just can't bring myself to subscribe to an additional service. 

Not sure how much longer Netflix will be around...  they are in debt due to unique productions and other providers are offering more for less.

netflix has over 100 years of shows.

there is always something on it.

lot of it sucks so if you are picky you may think there is nothing to watch

I think you'll find more problems on some forum related to netflix, where people will be comlaining they've bingewatched everything possible, and have nothing to watch.

Bitcoin price is also down, which slows traffic.  This forum can handle a lot more than it is today.

https://www.worthofweb.com/website-value/bitcointalk.org/

I think they're good man.

It occurs to me that since a large number of people are going to be stuck indoors for a while, the forums might be busier than usual.  Are Cloudflare ready to anticipate and cope with the extra demand?


//EDIT:  Confirmation from Theymos that all is well, locking the thread to prevent spam.