The sweet, horrible experience of unexpected rush of new users that newsblur has suffered now that Google Reader’s ditched by Google:

From http://highscalability.com/blog/2013/3/15/stuff-the-internet-says-on-scalability-for-march-15-2013.html

@NewsBlur’s tweet feed is a great blow by blow of the crush that happened when Google Reader became a dead app walking. A signup a second…Now fetching millions of new feeds hourly…Suspended free accounts, premium accounts only….Prices increased…Redis suffered from memory corruption…Moved from one app server to 6…Dropped SES for Mail Gun…Hosting provider died…Bringing up PostgreSQL read slaves…DB server upgrades…Introduction of HAProxy…More app servers.

• Spinning up more servers is unfortunately not a possibility. Too many moving parts and real database sharding takes weeks to write.
• You would think, because it’s been 24+ hours since the Reader bombshell, that things would have settled down by now. That they have not.