
Don’t Hit It Big Unless You’re Ready For It… - edragonu
http://www.dragosroua.com/dont-hit-big-unless-youre-ready-for-it/
======
zepolen
I don't understand when people go crazy with their servers after getting
mentioned on the social web because of the load. It's short lived, no need to
panic, just make the page static.

    
    
        wget http://www.mysite.com/page-being-hit-all-the-time -O /var/www/static.html
    

and add a rule to your webserver

    
    
        location /page-being-hit-all-the-time {
            return /var/www/static.html;
        }

~~~
edragonu
that's one elegant and simple solution, I agree :-) But in this case the load
wasn't so targeted, it was spread on 3-4 pages. But you're right, I could have
made them all 3 static.

Thanks for the info, really appreciated :-)

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MicahWedemeyer
I gotta disagree with the whole "make sure you're ready" idea here. It goes
against the launch-and-iterate mantra that I live by.

Always remember, the vast majority of sites don't scale...because they don't
have to. Just don't do anything really stupid when you're setting things up at
first, and be ready to make changes when (more like _if_ ) you ever get
popular.

Still, I do agree with not shooting from the hip in the middle of a huge
traffic load. Installing new plugins or tweaking code at these times is an
awful idea. Much better to call your host and ask to be bumped to a beefier
machine. Throw money at the problem and hope it helps.

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ynniv
Gah, wordpress. I serve static pages off of a PII-500mhz with 256MB RAM, and
50 concurrent users look about the same as 1. MySQL is not your friend. I'm
using blogger specifically because it pushes static files, but I want to check
out <http://github.com/mojombo/jekyll> (Ruby) or
<http://github.com/lakshmivyas/hyde> (Python).

------
diN0bot
how does one test this? write a script that uses threads to access pages in
parallel? see what happens...temporarily pay for more hardware (i have a
virtual machine with linode), gain some understanding, ..., profit

any particular services, snippets or frameworks people use to test this?

~~~
forkqueue
Apachebench ships with Apache and can be used for simple testing.

<http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/programs/ab.html>

For more realistic mutli-page tests Selenium works well - spin up a few EC2 or
similar machines, run Selenium Grid and you can get a decent idea of how your
site will cope.

For a simple Wordpress blog Apachebench should suffice though.

