When you visit Catch of the Day now, besides today’s main catch and small fishes, down at the bottom of the page you’ll also see the advertisement of the up coming Baitathon.

On the 27th of May we’ll be running a little members only promotion. We’ll be selling a lot of stuff that people love and want, at prices they could only dream about.

• This is a members only special event. Not a member? Click here to register. Its important to register in advance, as registration will be closing at 11am on the day, one hour before the event goes live.
• Its all happening to get people talking about CatchOfTheDay
• Quantities are very limited, and listed below
• We can’t predict how big the response will be, have mercy on our servers

We definitely fell on point 2 there by talking about it on this blog and this post on OzBargain. Although many still felt hurt from last year’s birthday bash fiasco (more details on the OzBargain wiki), it certainly did not stop them trying to run it again this year.

Well. At least they are trying to be honest this time and admit that there’s still possibily that their web servers cannot cope with load. They have also clearly listed out the quantity this time to avoid speculations like last time on exactly how many Nintendo Wii’s they have in their warehouse.

I had a quick glance on the items listed and unfortunately nothing interests me this time so I won’t queue up with you guys :)

Update: Just had a look at Rackspace’s managed configuration (I believe CoTD uses Rackspace for hosting), and the “cheapest” server has a quad core AMD, 2GB memory and runs RedHat Linux — at the price that’s around 10x our monthly hosting cost here at OzBargain (i.e. expensive).

Here are some simple suggestions for handing traffic surge (might not be possible as Rackspace is managing the system):

• Replace Apache/mod_php with Nginx/PHP-FastCGI (running 2 Nginx worker + ~10 PHP slaves) and enable xcache for op-code and variable caching.
• Replace your front page with a static HTML file which Nginx will serve in no time. Just re-generate it every few minutes for updates.
• Cache all the pages in xcache (using variable cache), and serve them to guests/visitors.

Even a quad core AMD Opteron will go a long way :)