You may remember a little while back we bought Gravatar. We now have the infrastructure to a point where we feel comfortable sending a lot more traffic to it.

So we’ve enabled Gravatar support for all of WordPress.com.

What’s that mean? When you have a WordPress.com account you can have an avatar by your comment, but now if someone isn’t logged in or registered but they have a Gravatar attached to their email account that will show up by their comments too. You may see a few new faces around. 🙂 Gravatars help build a sense of community around your readers, and keep people coming back to the comments.

Since doing this the requests to Gravatar have tripled to about 2,200 requests per second on average, with peaks to 3,000 per second.

Since there are 86,400 seconds in a day that takes us to 190,080,000 Gravatar requests per day, on average.