Thanks to it being posted on reddit, the traffic to a certain post on Michael Kimsal's blog gave him a crash (literally?) course in high load management on a WordPress blog.

The blog post was voted up on reddit, and the server got slammed. So slammed, in fact, that it was unusable for a few hours while I investigated the problem. I didn't know the post was on reddit, but I knew I was getting some traffic.

He spent some time trying to get the Apache server to finally die off and give him back his machine, at least enough to get a feel for what was going on. Part of his problem was not having APC installed like he thought and the other part - WordPress. While friendly on the outside, it's apparently somewhat lacking on the inside.

On his blog today Michael Kimsal asks a question that hasn't come up much in recent months - with all of the advancements browsers are adding in, why aren't there better hooks for measuring file downloads?

This current tirade stems from implementing a file upload progress meter in PHP5. Yes, PHP5.2 has some hook, and there's a PECL extension. [...] I realize this is partially a PHP issue I'm ranting about, but it's ultimately a hacky workaround to a basic piece of functionality that browsers should support.

He mentions an example where he basically directly asked a member of the IE team about it. It wasn't greeted seriously and still hasn't managed to be included in most of the popular browsers of today.