When we go for a publicized launch in the Fall, we'll need to be ready for a significant rise in hit traffic on the site. This is obviously not really predictable, but we can learn a lot from looking at the statistics for JL's Canadian Mysteries site, over a period when there was a publicity splash. I've retrieved some stats from Urchin for such a period, and these are the results:

So we need to plan for a dramatic increase of between three and four times the usage that we're used to seeing, assuming the site has had some publicity and traffic before. If it hasn't, we can base our predictions on the raw numbers, looking at something like a possible quarter-million pageviews in the week of the splash. Since this is a BC-centred project, these will all be concentrated during the waking hours, Pacific time. If we take a peak day of 60,000 hits, spread over (say) 15 hours (8 am to 11 pm), we're looking at a maximum of 5,000 hits per hour; we'd probably be safe if we plan for 100 hits per minute. This should be fairly easy to simulate. It's not as high as I feared, so it may be that even the development Tomcat setup will handle it.