The Colbert Bump vs Varnish Cache
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.