Case Study: The Bay Lights achieves uninterrupted performance during peak unveiling traffic with Cloudflare

The Bay Bridge Is Getting Its Moment In The Spotlight

WPI’s public art project The Bay Lights turned the West Span of the Bay Bridge into a large light installation and drove heavy interest in TheBayLights.org ahead of its March 5, 2013 unveiling. Lead Developer Brian VanderZanden expected a major traffic surge and asked Cloudflare to ensure the site could handle the spike without overloading WPI’s servers.

Cloudflare applied small optimizations (minification, fixing a non-proxied image), advised whitelisting Cloudflare IPs, and recommended enabling “Cache Everything” so full pages could be served from the edge. With those changes the site weathered the peak traffic—largest between 8–9pm—with lower system resource use, average I/O under 2 Mb/s during the peak, traffic back near baseline by midnight, and no service issues during the event.

The Bay Lights

Brian VanderZanden

Lead Developer