[BlueOnyx:16903] Re: Traffic

[Chris Gebhardt - VIRTBIZ Internet]

Hi Tim,

> Yesterday one of my clients,  <domain redacted> had an article
> posted about them on yahoo.
> Today about 11 am CST they started getting refer traffic from this article.
>
> So much is was bringing my server to a crawl.
>
> My access_log was zooming by using tali at a rate I have never seen before.
>
> Same after running netstat  endless ip's.
>
> My only solution was to check the bandwidth limits box for that site and
> the rest of the sites/server started working again

Ah yes, and now their site is down with the good 'ol 503 Service 
Temporarily Unavilable:
==============================
Service Temporarily Unavailable

The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to 
maintenance downtime or capacity problems. Please try again later.
==============================
Inaccessible.  So the one time they get some great publicity and stand 
to get a lot of visibility, you're unable to handle their load and their 
site goes down.

> I have never dealt with this before.
>
> How to you all deal with traffic spikes like this?

2 words:  Bandwidth & power.

You've got to have adequate amounts of both.  In an ideal world, copious 
amounts of both.

This is the flipside of the coin for the guys who run modded Cobalt RaQs 
or maybe an older server on minimal Internet.  Most of the time that 
works just great, because they're recycling (or freecycling!) old 
equipment, they stick it on a shelf in their office or corner of the 
house and connect via a broadband connection.  The needs are modest, so 
the server and connection can follow suit.

But then maybe something gets popular and that's when things start to 
fall apart.  The bandwidth gets fully saturated so you've got lots of 
requests queuing up.  The server can't efficiently process the load so 
it runs into the weeds.

Now, since I cannot see the website in question (because your server has 
it down as "temporarily unavailable") there's no way to tell the 
content.  Is it a dynamic site?  Static?  Lots of images?

Some tricks we've used in the past to help a really stingy customer who 
happened to get slammed with traffic for about an 8-month stretch but 
curiously didn't seem to have the money for a larger server was to 
offload some of the site's content to lighttpd. That worked great for 
static content like images, css, and so forth.  We compiled lighttpd 
right on their server and then proxied for the content.  Apache still 
served all the PHP.  After doing that and optimizing their images (no 
need to have 800kb JPEGs when a 22kb JPEG will do) their site began to 
work much better.

That was a kludge of a solution, however.   In their case, the 
underlying site construction was fairly poor and inefficient.  They 
eventually strung together enough to pop for a site redesign and a 
$59/mo server with us that to this day pushes a steady 40Mbps for their 
3 websites.   Problem permanently solved.

Let me know if you need a quick server.   That's something that can be 
fired up and placed online by the time your DNS change has propagated. 
Just a thought.

-- 
Chris Gebhardt
VIRTBIZ Internet Services
Access, Web Hosting, Colocation, Dedicated
www.virtbiz.com | toll-free (866) 4 VIRTBIZ