Could this site crash due to a user overflow?

Question

I'm just curious.

Comments

Seeing as how we have 63k+ users, I don't think that would happen.

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...I see... But still, who knows if that number makes the crashing point look like this: http://www.psdgraphics.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/performance-meter.jpg

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Pokemaster is probably better fit to answer this, but in short, yeah possibly. He’d have measures in place to deal with activity spikes though — you’d need them for a franchise like this where new games and unexpected new reveals will jolt your usage suddenly.
However, people do nasty things such as what is called a ‘denial-of-service attack’ (DoS) where they indeed crash a server by sending it too many requests at once. It’s not something you can do without the technical know-how though, and any good site makes it hard for you to do it anyway.
I know Smogon and especially Showdown used to get these a lot some time ago, but I can’t imagine any motive to crash pokemondb.

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Okay. (filler)

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Anyone can easily start hating Pokemon DB if he/she/it asks a completely valid question asking for a very specific answer, and that question gets down-voted a bunch of times and closed for being "useless", "low quality", or "impossible to answer". It's not just me, right?

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@sumwun - Nope, you're not the only one.

I'm not trying to say I hate this site, but other people do for some of sumwun's examples.

Answer 1

It's not clear exactly what you mean by "user overflow", but Fizz is correct about the activity spikes. We're set up pretty well to deal with those and DoS attacks.

I thought you were talking about integer overflow which is a programming term for when you have too many things to fit into an "integer" (a number variable). A standard integer allows storing numbers up to 4,294,967,295 (that's over 4 BILLION). If you tried to add 1 to that it would overflow back to 0 again. However I think 4 billion is enough for us :)