The Celtics being in the NBA finals has presented a new opportunity to watch what happens when the traffic spikes on the current architecture. Unlike other events the NBA finals are a series of matches which present an opportunity to test over time. I made a change recently to switch from 2.0 audio to 5.1 based on user feedback. The server went down for unrelated reasons during game 1. Game 2-4 saw record number of viewers watching. Game 4 last night has a high of around 400 viewers this is nearly an order of magnitude greater than the 65 viewers during the Super Bowl . However something seems to have gone wrong as highlighted by reddit posts. We aren’t sure what happened but the graphs below offer some clues. Game 2, 3 are the first two peaks but the last peak despite being a much higher number of viewers has half the bandwidth served. It’s also possible that people experienced errors but also possible that the Celtics were losing and many people turned off.
However the final clue that something went wrong is the large number of HTTP 400 error encountered unlike the earlier two games. We will try switching back to 2.0 audio to see if that improves things