It was so unusual I was half-convinced there must be a glitch in the tracking script, so I checked the server logs to compare. The server logs actually showed more hits—over 1300, in fact—during the same period. A lot of them were duplicated, though, which presumably means that people either hit reload after 10 seconds (not sure why), or they did something with the SU toolbar and came back. (Sadly, WP doesn’t yet provide 304 responses except on feeds).

If I’d caught the surge earlier, I would have turned on WP-Cache, but it seems to have weathered the storm just fine.

The last big traffic spike this site got was at the end of July, when three things converged: Girl Genius had a second round of technical difficulties, so people were searching and finding my post from the previous month. Lots of people were looking for Comic-Con photos. And my post on finding two female Flash cosplayers showed up on When Fangirls Attack. Even that only brought the total up to ~1,400. Today’s running 1,699 total hits to the blog, with just over 4 hours left to go.

It does seem to be slowing down now, so it’s not likely to have the staying power of the April 2006 surge in traffic to Another One Bites the Dust when the Jamie Jack and Stench show went off the air. That one managed ~600 hits per day over about 3 weeks.

After installing the A9 toolbar for testing, I decided I wanted to know just when they were contacting their server. I installed the Firefox versions of four toolbars and used netstat to see when they connected.

• A9 Toolbar: Constant connections to hosts at amazon.com and alexa.com, but only when the toolbar is visible.
• Google Toolbar: Opens initial connection to a Google-owned IP address. If PageRank display is enabled, or was earlier in the session, maintains continuous connections—even when the toolbar is hidden!
• Yahoo! Toolbar: Opens initial connections to a Yahoo server and to unknown.Level3.net (which, based on traceroute, appears to be on the way from here to Yahoo). Sometimes the latter remains open for a long time before closing. It does not appear to reconnect on its own.
• StumbleUpon: Only connects when you press its buttons.

Overall, these toolbars seem to behave in a privacy-friendly way. But it was disturbing that the Google toolbar keeps a connection open even when it’s hidden, and that disabling PageRank display doesn’t seem to stop the connections until you restart Firefox. (Maybe it does eventually, and I didn’t wait long enough.) If I’ve hidden the toolbar, I don’t need the functionality right then. There’s no reason to hold a network connection open until I re-show the toolbar.

If I only want to use these toolbars occasionally, I can just hide most of them through the View→Toolbars submenu. But to keep the Google Toolbar from phoning home, I have to either disable PageRank and restart Firefox, or disable the toolbar in the Extensions—and restart Firefox.