Free Day 2011 Recap
Forensics on our 2nd Free Day event. The ups, the downs. The lessons we learned were priceless!
Free Day 2011 is done. Thanks to everyone who helped load our servers to a crawl. Free Day officially ended at Thursday January 13th at 11:07:03AM. $150,541 was given out and $22,988 was donated to charity. Here are some other fun stats from the day.
We had:
- 11,495 correct answers to the quiz
- 1,099 wrong answers
- 9,884 people chose to take the quiz
- 1,395 people chose to take the lump sum
As of 1PM on Free Day we had 13 million HTTP requests (how many times did you press F5?).
We served 45,000 queries per second with a peak of 133Mbps, an order of magnitude more than what we usually see.
We kind of exploded our IRC channel. Thanks to Freenode and thanks to robint91 (from IRC) for tracking and putting together the graph!
Zaber (aka Shashin, a regular on our IRC channel) was kind enough to track the funds over time. Can you tell when the second webserver came back online? The trend lines aren't exact, but something like $40,000 was issued in the last 5 minutes.
Above is a a breakdown of the international participation. Thank you all!
Similar to last year, we hit a twitter trend! 2nd and 3rd! Not bad. Don't worry, Wayne's our cousin.
We even hit 4th on Google trends for a bit! WOW!
If you send us a 4-pack of 15-ounce Chocolate Lovers cookies to thank us for Free Day via Amazon fulfillment, you bet you get it posted on the homepage. Thanks Jon (aka python_guy on IRC). A sugar high (and eventual crash) added something special to the roller coaster that was Free Day.
Brennen and Ben in IT
Last year Solarbotics sent us flowers for our dead servers. This year, they sent us fire extinguishers. Well played, sir. Well played.
For those of you who want to try your hand at the quiz, we will be posting it by itself soon so that you can check it out. We're pretty proud of it! But remember, there's no pot of gold at the end of the quiz.
Will we do it again next year? Free Day is really painful on a lot of people at SparkFun but it does help us become a lot stronger. So maybe. We can always use more fire extinguishers.
