POTUS on Reddit - When Does the Narwhal Bacon?

By Ken Godskind

Test and Monitor | Posted August 30, 2012

The President of the United States (POTUS) spent about a half an hour yesterday afternoon answering questions on Reddit in a AMA (ask me anything Reddit format).

President Obama has frequently been out ahead of most other politicians on the web, and this Reddit AMA event was smack in the middle of the Republican National Convention! Think that was planned? Doing a Reddit AMA certainly adds to the president's coolness factor. BUT…does he know "When the Narwhal Bacons?" If he does then he would be hip and cool :))

I saw a number of reports that Reddit servers were overloaded and crashed during this 4:00-4:30ET period. While I did see a few we are overloaded screen shots posted in a couple of the articles I really don't think Reddit really crashed. I'm sure their architecture is designed to respond softly to overloads rather than anything as hard as a crash.

reddit under heavy load

Taking a look at our own Business Benchmarks for Social Networks I didn't see any serious impacts although we were only sampling at 5-min intervals during this period.

Here's a chart of what the Reddit home page performance looked like during that period.

Now, I'll give the President even more hipster points if he knows who C'Thulhu is. And, while you're here, check out this little narwhal video on you tube!

See also:

Obamawhal Photo credit: pausd.org