I have the lucky position of having to do scaling for not only Oprah, but american idol, the superbowl, x factor, inaugurations and more. we have had artists o

I have the lucky position of having to do scaling for not only Oprah, but american idol, the superbowl, x factor, inaugurations and more. we have had artists on Oprah many times, probably a dozen in the last five years. It has nearly no effect. The largest bump we see is during the central timezone broadcast. The east and west code feeds have negligible effect unless you ask for it by doing an "expensive" call to action on the site. I define that to mean asking every user to do a db or server intensive task, like signing up for a site, logging in, commenting, etc. We generally avoid db writes during load events. I would recommend a good cdn though and offloading as much as possible to them. Incidentally the biggest impacts for us have been xfactor, american idol, glee, and the biggest was Tom petty on the superbowl. The only time I have ever watched it willingly.