As I'm sure you're all aware the long awaited first Windows 8 leak is finally here. At first I was very apprehensive on how the server would cope with the almost guaranteed influx of traffic. I had no idea what to expect so I was on edge the whole evening.

At about 3.30pm GMT, the build leaked. Within minutes the 100Mbps pipe on the server was at 100% capacity - hardly surprising to be honest. Everyone wanted to be the first to get it!

Almost immediately after the leak, the news was posted on Neowin. That itself brought in hundreds of visitors over the course of the evening according to analytics. Of course the visitors weren't just limited to Neowin, as the link was posted over lots of news websites, posted on IRC's, forums, personal messages and even word of mouth.

At 7pm GMT we reached the peak visitors for the evening. Over 500 forum users were online at the same time, and there were over 300 new user registrations attempting to get their copy of the build from our FTP. Since the FTP was at it's capacity, speeds started to slow for each new person that logged on. The average speed was just 130KB/s (1.1Mbps). Still, that's more than some can expect from torrents even at the best of times. Never the less, people managed to download the build successfully and enjoy their moment!

Bandwidth from 12pm, 12th April to 12pm, 13th April 2011


By 10pm, the traffic was dying off, but not after over 8000 people had visited the site in under 8 hours. Posting on the two leak topics continued throughout the night as everyone discussed their findings and asked their questions about this new build.

Having checked the analytics this afternoon during my lunch hour, we've already broken the the same 8000 visitors barrier in another 12 hours, and are now approaching 10,000 visitors. I expect to see this up another 50% before the day is out at least. The number of people on the forum also spiked to almost 700 as everyone logged in on their lunch hour this afternoon.





I am thoroughly astounded at the stability of the website during this time, especially given the server has never seen this amount of traffic (and nor have I had it on any site before, or BA for that matter). A couple of members informed me of some 503 (Service Unavailable) errors being served occasionally during the peak in traffic. IIS was set to 500 maximum connections, so I trippled this to 1500 connections and trippled the PHP allocation. This solved the 503 issue. Less than 50% of the powerful Quad Core CPU was being used to serve over 500 visitors to the site.

CPU Usage from 12pm, 12th April to 12pm, 13th April 2011


A few seconds of "lag" was happening on occasion but nothing that upset any visitors. I put this down to the sheer I/O that was being forced upon the servers hard drive at the time. Even posting to the site was pretty much instant even with a huge peak.

I hope you'll stand with me when I say I'm proud of the server that I've set up, and more especially the people that make BA possible - the members, the moderators and my co-admin mrpijey, but more importantly the anonymous leaker that made this release possible. Thank you all for your continued support!


Update 13/04/2011 @ 19:00:
Wow, what can I say. We got a link from Engadget and our traffic has kept on increasing all day!

Yesterday, just under 9000.
Today, over 24,000 (so far!).

This sounds very interesting. People should keep in mind though that this particular leak (7850) is just Milestone 1 and therefore should not expect to see any major or overwhelming changes.

Don't take this the wrong way Andy, but after reading those numbers I'm surprised the site was still nice and responsive!

While I was downloading from the BA FTP it disconnected me around 47%

I was like "NOOOOOOOOOOO" lol

But it was not the FTP's fault, my router had decided to reboot itself, once I was back online, and thanks to FireFTPs 40+ reconnect attempts, it continued from where it left off and I managed to complete the download.

Very impressed that the entire setup (Considering BA was as far as I know) the first to get the leak, managed to cope the entire time, and still is

I want to thanks firstly the Anonymous Leaker, secondly Andy and BA, since BA is the first one that got the Windows 8 leak and it has been released immediatly.

I only just saw the news yesterday around midnight, so I downloaded my copy this morning, and pulled it down with 3MB/s.
And I hope the anonymous leaker leaks some later builds later on or maybe another anonymous leaker.

Don't get me wrong with the sentence above, I don't want to look people who only say ''GIVE NOW'', every leak is awesome when it leaks.

Good to know the server didnt keeel over lol

I really want to thank the leaker too. I'm trying to get the build too, to run it in VMWare (in case it decides to break down or so ).
Thanks for the other people that helped as well! And of course thanks for the site it didn't go down

I've got to say, I know for sure that my wimpy AMD Athlon 64 FX-53 server wouldn't hold up with that load. It would probably hang under that much stress because of the fact that it doesn't have the power of a dual core processor.

That is definitely an insane state for a server to deal with. It's started to make its way to torrent sites as well, taking the load.

Just thought I'd post this...

A big thank you to anonymous leaker for 7850 and to Andy for this site Although I lurked here for almost 4 years, seems I chosen the right days to become an active user Hoping new builds will leak in the near future, but also hoping that BA won't have too many attentions from MS because of these leaks.

Holy crap yep it's amazing how the site handled up all the charge (No offense to you and your server Andy ), I was following the bandwidth and it's amazing how it went to 100 mbps in no time. I downloaded my build always at 400-500 kb/sec, though it had started with 600.
Thanks to BA and thanks to the anonymous leaker, ofc.

Now who said quad core CPU are pointless. Bet the old Core 2 duo server would of fell flat on its face, and tbh, so would abyss

WOW, so much usage. Lucky it stayed up for so long. Though I found it's better than torrents for the people who got in first, as Torrents you'd have to wait for the seeders to build up. I got in early for this, and even though people reported it went down mine kept going. If it was a torrent, I would have been there for days. But thanks to the wonderful team, the FTP server stayed up Just hope the next Windows 8 leak does not cause this much hype. I guess may just be this one as it was the first leak of 8.

great work, i was one that learned of betaArchive with this leak, hope soon a x64 milestone 3 will be avaliable

but dont you need Advanced Members Group access to get the FTP server? looks like some noobs registered and tried to get advanced members access in 1 day lol.

If a M2-M3 build leaks you can install it onto the server and check if it affects network balancing.

No, you can't install an OS on a server like that. Also Andy only has access remotely to the server in the OVH in France (right?) so he just can manage settings and so on, just access the Windows environment normally, he doesn't have the server next to him.

What spider-vice said is correct.
To add.

Running an Pre-beta or any beta version on an production environment is not recommended and totally unsupported as well.
You can go ahead at home, since that is not an production environment.

Also, OVH supplies the OS'es and so on.

Well done gentleman - managing systems engineering for a pretty large company - we dread the days we KNOW are going to be huge - only because the unknown stinks. Bravo!

Lots of publicity you got there Andy... I myself also learnt of this site from Engadget and Gizmodo. You guys seem to be doing very well .

Managing such a burst of traffic takes some good server config. Well done there .

I'll say this much andy I was impressed that your FTP did not crash from so much traffic since you were getting so many requests at once for it lol. So that being said I think your ftp will be able to handle the bandwidth for leaking windows 8 builds since torrents are just slow at getting started.