[BlueOnyx:16905] Re: Traffic

[Michael Stauber]

Hi Tim,

> How to you all deal with traffic spikes like this?

There is certainly no "one size fits all" way out of such a conundrum.
And one might treat a hobby site differently than a revenue generating
site in such occasions.

I've had this myself a few times and also assisted clients who were
under such (or similar) onslaughts. You tweak what settings you can
tweak and look for all forms of optimization.

If lucky the site is already kinda optimized.

Sometimes it has all the sins. Such as abundant usage of unoptimized
images and everything and the kitchen sink is served out of MySQL via
highly inefficient scripts. If that's the case, then you'll have a
really hard time.

If it has to be kept up by all means, then one might look into putting
the webserver onto a different port and to run a Squid proxy or a
Varnish cache in front of it. That can considerably decrease the load,
but might require extensive tweaking to get some of the active content
working where logged in users see different snippets of content. Which
especially is an issue with shopping carts and such.

Throwing more hardware at it might also be an option. Like cloning the
site and putting a load balancer in front of it.

But all of that falls into the "it depends" category and might not
always be an option if the site and database design doesn't support it.

-- 
With best regards

Michael Stauber