Everyone was excited for Apple’s newest operating system, Mountain Lion, but evidence of a major increase in Apple’s server traffic really confirmed just how many people this meant, with traffic being five or six times higher than normal.
Sandvine, a company that makes tools to manage and track traffic for network carriers such as phone companies, took a photo of the combined iTunes and Mac App Store traffic from a sample of a North American broadband operator. A similar spike in traffic was found last year when Apple’s Lion OS was released, according to one Sandvine analyst, Dan Dineeth. The photo was taken at 3p.m. EST on June 25.
Apple’s servers are already busier than most with over 46 million App Store downloads every day, as well as music, movies, books, and more content that is sold through iTunes. Obviously it wasn’t just the release of Mountain Lion that caused such an increase in traffic. Apple’s release of software updates for a number of applications, including iWork for Mac and iOS (Pages, Numbers, Keynote), iPhoto, iMovie, Aperture, iTunes U, Podcasts, and more, have also contributed to the increase in traffic.
Sandvine is also predicting another spike in traffic around 7p.m. as people arrive home from work and download and install the new software updates that they didn’t have time to do yesterday.
Source: GigaOM via Cult of Mac
