Each year, the SXSW Music, Film and Interactive Conferences (sxsw.com) solicit session ideas from the community for the upcoming event using Panel Picker. After submissions are collected, PanelPicker launches a voting interface that allows the world to pick what sessions they'd like to see at SXSW. As soon as the polls open, there is a flood of social media-fueled traffic and all sorts of other challenges for a small IT team to manage. Earlier this week the PanelPicker for the 2012 SXSW Festival began taking votes and traffic to it was intense. That's where CloudFlare came in.
While the site continues to hum along powering millions of page views, CloudFlare has helped SXSW cut bandwidth use by almost half and substantially decrease the load on their servers. SXSW manages their own system security, so they turned CloudFlare's security settings to a low and just used us for the performance benefits.
You can see the effects of enabling CloudFlare on the SXSW servers for yourself:
The SXSW conferences are being held in Austin, TX from March 9 - 18. Members of the CloudFlare team are represented on four proposed panels, so we recommend you test to make sure the PanelPicker is running fast and smooth yourself by heading over there and voting up the following proposed panels:
Finally, let us know if you're planning on attending SXSW 2012. We plan to be there in force and would love to celebrate in Austin with everyone at SXSW from the CloudFlare community!