Since the launch over 9000 users from all over the world have used We See In Every Direction
Here’s some We See In Every Direction usage statistics. During the last five days there has been an average of 40 users surfing the web with the We See In Every Direction browser at the same time. Since the launch We See has been used by over 9000 people and they have surfed to over 300.000 URL’s. The new users come from all over the world and most of them found it through either Wired, Gizmodo or the Daily What. When Jandan.net, a very popular chinese website, published an article about the browser a big wave of Chinese users appeared which consequently crashed the Node.js server over and over again – it was too much data for the server to handle. During the peak the server was averaging 8MB/s of outbound traffic, that’s 480MB a minute or around 29GB an hour. Each mouse position is updated 20 times a second – so when there’s 50 people using We See, it’s around a 1000 mouse positions being sent to the server and to all the connected users every second. Next to that, We See is also sending the text in all input field, URL’s and the scroll position. As you can imagine, that doesn’t really scale all that well when it’s above 40 users.
Surfing chinese websites with around 70 users at the same time
After a day of total madness going on with around 60 users fighting for control I decided to split the users into rooms of 8, both to lower the load on the server and to make it possible to actually browse and not just fight for control. Since then the server runs a lot smoother. So now you can surf the webs with We See In Every Direction with a maximum of 8 people at the same time.