Macieg Ceglowski breaks down what happened during the mass exodus from Delicious and how the Pinboard team dealt with the huge influx of users that resulted from that event. It’s a great analysis of how they coped the traffic increase, and what kinds of measures they needed to take in order to scale to meet the new demand. There’s a nice summary at the end of lessons learned from this, particularly what they did well, and what they should have done differently.
If you’re a developer looking to make any kind of scalable service, it’s worth a read.