It didn’t take long for OS X Mountain Lion to hit the top of the Mac App Store’s paid chart following its release yesterday, which means Apple shifted a heck of a lot of copies on day one. In fact, it sold so many copies that traffic from the Cupertino company’s servers was up to six times higher than normal.
Apple’s servers are already busier than most, what with serving more than 46 million App Store downloads every day, plus all the music, movies, books, and more it sells through iTunes. But according to a company called Sandvine, which develops tools to monitor traffic for network carriers, OS X Mountain Lion boosted traffic from Apple’s server by five to six times its normal rate.
Sandvine took the snapshot of iTunes and Mac App Store traffic you see above at 3 p.m. EST on June 25.
According to one of the company’s analysts, it saw a similar spike last year when Apple released OS X Lion through the Mac App Store.
Of course, it wasn’t just Mountain Lion that got us all downloading. Apple also released software updates for a whole host of applications, including iWork on both Mac and iOS, iPhoto, iMovie, Xcode, Podcasts, Safari, iTunes U and more.
Sandvine expects a similar spike at around 7 p.m. EST today, when everyone comes home from work and begins downloading all the updates they didn’t get chance to download yesterday. The company reports that iTunes and Mac App Store traffic always tends to peak around this time.
Source: Sandvine
Via: GigaOM