Major political blogs are bracing for heavy traffic today, and some are adjusting their infrastructure in an effort to handle heavy traffic as readers track get-out-the-vote efforts and early results. Among them is Daily Kos, which says it is shuttering parts of its site to reduce the load on the web server.
“We’ve gone to great lengths to stay on the air today,” site owner Kos (Markos Moulitsas Zรบniga) wrote this morning. “The archives will be turned off today. They are a resource drain we cannot afford to have. So you won’t be able to view or search for any diary or story older than 10-14 days.” Kos noted that he has “some serious juice powering the site” but was prepared to turn off ads if the site begins to slow. Daily Kos is hosted by Voxel dot Net, which offers a clustered hosting infrastructure that offers improved scalability for traffic bursts. A chart tracking the performance of Daily Kos is available.