Empty bravado had kept tensions bearable, fear filling every gap in thought and talk. This was what they wanted, wasn’t it? The bait was set, and a confident enemy surged in swift response, ready to rush and crash. Scouts had returned with reports of the massive numbers stampeding, and a question crept into minds of all that stood waiting: would it hold?
Nope.
How many times have you found a link on your favorite social news site only to click it and find the server unresponsive? Too many times, most of you will say. This problem is far from uncommon, and unfortunately, it’s too often neglected by the marketing crowd, ready to just put a link up and wait for the traffic to roll (read: pile, avalanche) in. The reason is simple: the servers cannot deal with the insanely high amount of hits it gets from Digg, Reddit or any other popular UGC/social media site. So how do you fix that bitter-sweet problem? Is there even a solution, or are you doomed to watch your servers get trampled by the onslaught? Worry not, NVI is here.
There are several solutions. None of them actually guarantee that your server will withstand a Digg push and homepage - in war, there are few certainties - but they will all help. In the examples, we will use a traditional popular setup: PHP 5, Apache 2, MySQL 5 running on a Linux (assuming Debian) server. Feel free to ask questions in the comments - we’ll do our best to explain how you can use our methods in your environment. Obviously, one of the best ways to ensure your server will resist incoming traffic spikes is optimize your (already clean) code, but it’s probably the most difficult, too, and the one you have least control over. (more…)
