On New Years Day, we ran the first large-scale stress test of our video and chat infrastructure. The goal was simple, fail. We wanted to set benchmarks for where we are and what we need to focus on next.

Over the course of the two hour show we had over 2,200 unique IP addresses and 36,000 minutes of video streamed. At any one given time there were 500 viewers chatting, equally over 7,000 total messages. The performers raised a total of 3.85432 ETH in tips, and experienced the world’s first blockchain-powered orgasm.

The video quality, as anyone lucky enough to be present knew, was not the best (the content, however, was exceptional). Our small-scale tests suggested that we would be able to reliably stream HD video, but degraded to well below acceptable quality during the show.

We believe this was the result of a combination of factors, and the vendor is actively investigating the cause (this post will be updated once we’ve found a resolution).

The scale of this test uncovered two major issues with our chat system:

First, our moderation dashboard had not been built anticipating the massive turnout, and crashed within a few minutes of the first show starting. This meant we were unable to block users or keywords. Second, we forgot to change nginx’s worker_connections parameter from the default of 512, so only the first 512 users who connected were able to participate. Overall, though, our intentionally constrained environment allowed us to understand the boundaries of our tech.

New viewers in 5 minute intervals:

Our next large-scale demo will be performed at the AVNs at the end of January, where viewers can expect to enjoy full HD video, a delightful (and spam-free!) chat experience, and the world’s first lesbian blockchain-powered orgasms.

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