The end of the year (holiday season in many parts of the world) usually means more people with more free time to participate in more challenges, read more fic, or post more fanart, resulting in more site usage.
Isn't the end-of-year server strain primarily caused by Yuletide? I'm sure people have more free time as well, but it seems odd not to mention Yuletide, as though it's some kind of elephant in the room.
Obviously, you're nit-picking. Yuletide is hardly the 'elephant in the room' simply because it wasn't mentioned by name. The end of the year is the holiday season for multiple holidays celebrated around the world, not just Yuletide.
Just as obviously, you have no idea what you're talking about. Yuletide is in reference to the small fandoms fic exchange, and it always causes problems that the AO3 doesn't acknowledge publicly.
But realistically, logic would dictate that... Yeah, Yuletide grows every year, but not nearly as exponentially as the AO3 has. Every year, the amount of traffic that Yuletide brings is going to be a smaller and smaller part of overall Archive traffic. I don't really even remember much at all in the way of slowdowns at Yuletide last year, for instance, although my memory might be off.
I certainly remember there being slowness last year. Hell, the site was like molasses just a few weeks ago on the last day of Yuletide sign-ups. It does stand to reason that it's a smaller percentage of site traffic overall, but it still has an effect.
Anyway, I just thought it was strange that they'd acknowledge the site has issues at the end of the year but attribute it to some vague shift in user habits during the holidays, not mentioning Yuletide by name as you quite rightly point out they have done in some past years.
I'm the author of this post and also the chair of the Accessibility, Design, & Technology committee. I rather obsessively maintain a spreadsheet of various site stats for this year, including traffic indicators and work/user/comment counts for every month. I'm also a member of the Support team, so I see every single bug report and feature suggestion as it comes in. This gives me a good idea of trends in site usage; for example, I see when there is an uptick in challenge-related Support tickets.
Yuletide is one of many challenges that brings visitors to the Archive at this time of year, and it has indeed caused problems in the past, as we've acknowledged in the posts you've seen. The Archive was a lot smaller in those days, so we weren't equipped to handle tens of thousands of extra visitors coming to check out the Yuletide stories after reveals.
However, as the Archive has grown, we've modified our code and upgraded our hardware to let us handle millions of visitors on a regular basis: we had 4 million unique visitors in September 2013 and 4.2 million in October 2013. For comparison, there were fewer than 300,000 unique visitors per month when we experienced significant Yuletide-related problems in December 2010/January 2011.
Here's a chart illustrating what we're seeing in terms of increased usage as the holiday season approaches. The x-axis is a bit crammed, but basically every dot represents one week ending on the date given (always a Sunday).
Yuletide nominations opened on Monday, Sep 16, and closed on Monday, Sep 23. I have marked the week ending on Sep 22 with a light green dot.
Yuletide sign-ups opened on Friday, Oct 8, and closed on Monday, Oct 14. I have marked the week ending on Oct 13 with a purple dot.
Since it seems unlikely that the simple presence of Yuletide assignments (and unrevealed works) on the Archive is driving up traffic numbers, the increase in page views over the last four weeks is more likely due to a combination of other causes, some of which we discussed in the post. It remains to be seen how story reveals will affect site performance in December and January, but the odds are that the contributions to overall server load from Yuletide will be a very small fraction of the general holiday traffic.
That chart was very interesting. I'm sure lot's of us would love to see more site stats like that, but I realize it's time consuming to collect and format the data.
We actually publish stats like this with some regularity, although not as often or as detailed as we might like. You can see all relevant posts in our site stats tag. We're planning to compile a roundup post for 2013 closer to the end of the year (with moar charts!), so keep an eye on the news posts. :-)
Jump to conclusions much? I am obviously not referring to Christmas (which I don't hear many people in the present century seriously calling "yuletide", and that might have been a clue), but to Yuletide, the very large fanfiction exchange that has taken place every December since 2003 and is currently hosted on this site. http://archiveofourown.org/collections/yuletide
Comment on Site slowness and other currently known issues
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