Quora Signups Exploded In Late December ? Then Doubled From That This Week

So this service Quora, it's getting pretty hot. But up until now, we've only be able to guestimate how hot it actually is. But today they've finally shared some actual information ? on Quora, naturally. Specifically, Quora engineer Albert Sheu has put up a long answer to the question: Why did the Quora website get so slow at the end of December 2010? The reason Sheu gives includes a brief�explanation�of how the service works. When someone adds an answer or updates one, everyone else on that page sees the new information in realtime. That's obviously not easy to scale, and Sheu says they've never tested it beyond 2 to 3 times their normal load. That was an issue at the end of December because they started seeing spikes of 5 to 10 times their normal activity.

Monet Mazur Rozonda Thomas