Sportkin Under Pressure — Investigation Ongoing

On 14 October, Sportkin experienced an extraordinary traffic surge, with approximately 437,000 requests to a single endpoint in one day — more than double the previous day's volume.

If only all that traffic had translated into new Sportkin members — that would have been a welcome surge of a very different kind!

The traffic was spread across hundreds of thousands of IP addresses. We also observed an unusual concentration of Google Analytics sessions attributed to Singapore, although the true origins of the server traffic remain uncertain.

The surge coincided with Apache reaching its configured capacity, repeated PHP processing errors and an unexplained server reboot.

We've since increased PHP processing capacity and raised Apache's maximum worker limit from 150 to 250 — a roughly 67% increase.

In simple terms, this allows Apache to handle more requests concurrently, much like opening additional checkout lanes in a supermarket. It doesn't mean 250 visitors maximum, but gives the server more room to process simultaneous requests before reaching its configured limit.

The changes give Sportkin more capacity, although PHP processing and other server resources can still become bottlenecks. Their effectiveness under another major surge remains to be tested.

Another positive outcome was gaining a real-world glimpse of how much traffic the existing infrastructure could handle, where its limitations lie, and how much additional infrastructure Sportkin may need to support mainstream growth. It's a valuable lesson in planning for scale before the demand arrives.

Was it automated traffic, bots, or something else? The evidence isn't conclusive yet.

Building and maintaining a platform like Sportkin means turning unexpected challenges into opportunities to learn, improve and strengthen the systems behind it. The investigation continues.

#Sportkin #SKIZCorp #WebInfrastructure #Technology #SystemEngineering