A Good Problem to Have
by Rick Overman · 09/26/2006 (3:23 pm) · 14 comments
So you have probably been wondering where the h*** have the web guys gone? Let me assure you we are still here working harder than ever. In fact, we recently added another person to the team, Jacob Fike, the evil mastermind of the PHP Overlord project manager (which we are using for our web projects).
I have been tackling an interesting problem lately -- dealing with all the new traffic generated from our announcement of TorqueX and Torque Game Builder. What a great problem to have! I remember the first time we got Slashdotted 6 years ago, OUCH! These days Slashdot is barely a noticeable bump in the road compared to what we are dealing with on a day to day basis. The interesting problem has been figuring out how to build out our infrastructure to deal with these massive new tidal waves of traffic and not pay an arm and a leg for it and need 3 new IT guys just to manage it. We evaluated a number of options but decided to partner with Akamai. So as of today GarageGames is leveraging 20,000 globally distributed servers in over 1,000 Network Operations Command Centers (NOCCs) in 71 countries to accelerate the delivery of this website and downloads to you!
Nice! I would really like to hear from all you GarageGamer's overseas -- how does the website "feel" and how fast are the demo downloads for you?
That's it for now, lots more good stuff to come in the days ahead!
--Rick
I have been tackling an interesting problem lately -- dealing with all the new traffic generated from our announcement of TorqueX and Torque Game Builder. What a great problem to have! I remember the first time we got Slashdotted 6 years ago, OUCH! These days Slashdot is barely a noticeable bump in the road compared to what we are dealing with on a day to day basis. The interesting problem has been figuring out how to build out our infrastructure to deal with these massive new tidal waves of traffic and not pay an arm and a leg for it and need 3 new IT guys just to manage it. We evaluated a number of options but decided to partner with Akamai. So as of today GarageGames is leveraging 20,000 globally distributed servers in over 1,000 Network Operations Command Centers (NOCCs) in 71 countries to accelerate the delivery of this website and downloads to you!
That's it for now, lots more good stuff to come in the days ahead!
--Rick
About the author
#2
Christophe
09/26/2006 (7:08 pm)
No problem from France, I download the demo at full speed (1216 Kb)Christophe
#3
09/26/2006 (9:22 pm)
No problem from Brazil too. I download the files very fast.
#4
09/26/2006 (10:11 pm)
Wow, this is amazing stuff! Congrats! I'm so glad to see Garage Games moving forward like this.
#5
09/27/2006 (2:03 am)
Even though I've been capped for the month, I'm getting decent speeds from Australia.
#6
09/27/2006 (2:33 am)
At the moment I'm in Serbia. From Serbia, my ping to a server in California is about 200 ms. For www.garagegames.com it's only 50 ms. 
#7
09/27/2006 (2:33 am)
UK speeds seem good :) 
#8
Good speed, btw.
09/27/2006 (2:44 am)
Mark, I think they only changed their downloads and not the site.Good speed, btw.
#9
09/27/2006 (3:07 am)
Germany: Speed is fine. I'm sitting right next to an Akamai cache. :-) 
#10
09/27/2006 (3:50 am)
GG & Akamai rocks! Russia / Moscow: really really good speed! (and only 7 ping hops to the servers, responce time is about 25-27ms)
#11
09/27/2006 (9:57 am)
Speed is top-notch in Canada. Were on the other side of the great lakes, that counts, right?
#12
Every page is at least being gzip compressed and delivered via an edgeServer.
ALL images are being delivered from edgeServers.
Several dozen relatively static pages are being completely cached on the edgeServers.
Highly dynamic pages are still being funneled back to our primary server.
09/27/2006 (10:12 am)
@Stefan - The entire GarageGames.com site is being funneled through Akamai.Every page is at least being gzip compressed and delivered via an edgeServer.
ALL images are being delivered from edgeServers.
Several dozen relatively static pages are being completely cached on the edgeServers.
Highly dynamic pages are still being funneled back to our primary server.
#13
09/28/2006 (1:00 am)
Yeah, thinking about it, this is a VERY NICE problem to have isnt it :) too many users :) 
#14
09/28/2006 (6:30 pm)
I'm with Mathieu, it's fantastic 20 minutes from Buffalo where I live (Welland, Ontario) :D 
Torque Owner Charlie Malbaurn
Good luck with everything else. If you have as much freedom as we have had from using them, you will be able to concentrate on other things.