On March 26th, our client at WaterDefense.org let us know that Mark Ruffalo (the Incredible Hulk in this summer's The Avengers) would be appearing on The Colbert Report to promote Water Defense. Being familiar with the show, we immediately considered the effects of The Colbert Bump, and whether our server could handle it. We'd heard of the Bump before, but had no idea what sort of numbers we'd be facing for traffic to the site. Ultimately, we put our faith in our existing caching system, Varnish.
Varnish sits between a visitor's browser and the website, and only engages the website when it doesn't have an existing saved version of the page to serve up. Essentially, if 1000 people view the same page in a short span of time, Varnish only has to really load the page once. Varnish is very good at what it does, and our server survived the Colbert Bump without so much as a hiccup!
Traffic was up around 3000% during the period following the show. It's great to know that such a worthy cause is getting the attention.
And personally? I just think it's cool to hear Stephen Colbert promoting a site I got to build!