
How to hurricane-proof a web server for Harvey - lainon
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/09/how-to-hurricane-proof-a-web-server/
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otterpro
I was hoping to see data center that was barricading itself physically against
the flooding with sandbox and preparing with diesel generators and disaster
recovery. I think web traffic would've been the last thing on my mind.

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brianwawok
TLDR; Install caching plugins to wordpress, run on a server that is oversized
about 100x for steady state load.

Which I guess works, but is not that interesting of a technical read? If you
were not on wordpress, I bet you could have served that load from a single VM
on a cloud provider, with the ability to scale as needed.

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CharlesW
Here's the actual TLDR from the article:

    
    
      * Dedicated hardware server—no shared hosting
      * Gigabit uplink to handle burst traffic 
      * Varnish cache with lots of RAM 
      * Plugin-light WordPress installation 
      * Off-box stats via WordPress/Jetpack 
      * Cloudflare as a CDN 
      * No heavy dependencies (i.e., ad networks)

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js2
And really "Cloudflare as a CDN" was the most important. It absorbed almost
all of the traffic:

 _Between August 22 and August 30, Cloudflare served over five terabytes of
cached Space City Weather content via Cloudflare’s CDN. Only about 145GB worth
of requests had to be served by the Space City Weather Web server itself.
[...] Looking at raw requests instead of bytes, Cloudflare handled about 88
percent of those, too, with only about 12 percent of requests passed back up
the chain to the origin server._

The origin server ended up seeing peaks of 50 RPS, most of that was absorbed
by Varnish. I guess 50 RPS is a lot for WordPress, though I'm surprised given
the origin server is a decent box:

 _The server has a quad-core Xeon E3-1230 CPU, 16GB of RAM, and mirrored R1
SSDs._

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DamonHD
Good write-up. And it kept him off the streets.

Many moons ago when a US Robotics Courier modem on a leased analogue line was
still bleeding edge live IP provision in the UK, one of our pages got featured
in "Mirsky's Worst of the Web" and our line was just maxed out for days.
Divide all the CPU and line speeds by a few orders of magnitude and it all
felt much the same getting what would become known as /.-ed... B^>

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mi100hael
I'd be curious to see whether any additional performance could be eeked out by
ditching HAProxy & Varnish. Nginx can terminate TLS and handle caching, which
would reduce the overhead of multiple separate processes & connections.

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bhhaskin
Warning: Autoplaying video ad. No audio, so that is a plus.

