However Bingham had a tough time during the Iowa caucuses in early January 2008 due to the site's increased use of memcache. A designed to serve front page stories and recommended diary entries to anonymous users meant the site was brought to its knees every five minutes as its Web server caches were simultaneously updated.

A weekend spent reading and the removal of a few site features ensured the problem was fixed before the New Hampshire primary a few days later, and a hardware upgrade stopped most problems by the Pennsylvania primary in April.

Along with server upgrades and consolidation, Bingham's time was spent improving back-end code and hunting down inefficiencies in Perl code and database tables and queries. He said the server upgrades improved the function of the already optimised code and reduced maintenance and administration requirements.

The rise of the Kos

The site has come a long way since Moulitsas ran it using the weblog management system on a shared server. Bingham shifted the site onto running on a dual Pentium 4 with 1GB of RAM. As registered users increased, the back-end was upgraded to a server cluster with a couple of dual Xeon Web front-end servers and an Opteron database server for load distribution.