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Ask HN: Suggestions to handle 1000x traffic?

6 points by dholowiski ↗ HN
I manage a web site that runs on a CMS on a typical LAMP stack (AWS, Cloudfront). Next week, it's possible our site traffic might go up to several million unique views per day, for about 5 days. Aside from 'boot more servers up' I'm wondering if the HN crowd can provide some advice or suggestions on how to handle a 1000 times increase in web traffic, for 5 days.

7 comments

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jgrahamc
The Today Show (in the US) recommends that people appearing on it first sign up their web site for CloudFlare to handle temporary massive load.
dholowiski
Cloudflare seems like a smart option - can anyone who's used it comment? Does it affect your google analytics measurements?
canatan01
I have it installed on one of my websites as a test. Installing was real easy; only a DNS change needed.

I used it to increase my google pagespeed score, which it did. It does effect Analytics though but mainly the tracking of the visitor ID. But Cloudflare has a text on that, but have not yet read it.

chrisacky
CMS that servers static content that isn't rotating lots?

You should possibly look at runnign a reverse proxy cache then. I've had fantastic success with Varnish.

I've been able to increase the performance of Drupal by a factor of several thousand by running Varnish.

Since you are running a CDN already then I assume you have moved all of your static assets off onto there.

mootothemax
First of all - make sure you've covered the quick wins: use nginx, php-fpm, cache as much as possible in memory (PHP's APC is easy enough to use). Make sure that MySQL is optimized and has the same easy quick wins covered (e.g. query cache).

And then have fun with the advanced topics :)

webbruce
Cloudflare is supposedly helpful for that
cheald
If it's static content (ie, not changing super frequently and not customized per viewer), you could drop Varnish in front of it and more or less crash-proof the whole thing. Cloudflare is a similar sort of solution, but you don't control it and it's been spotty for me.

You can optimize your application all you want, but you're never going to get better performance that a caching proxy handling most of your requests.