Surviving a Slashdotting

Too much traffic

[spike2131]

I run an election related website, and I'm currently recieving massive amounts of traffic after being linked to from a story on the front page of Yahoo. Very few of my page request are getting through.

I run an apache 1.3 server on a virtual private server. Is there anything I can configure to survive this traffic hit in a more gracefull manner?

Any other ideas?

Thanks,

Bobby

[Matt Probert]

Login to your server and enter:

netstat -na ¦ grep ^tcp ¦ wc -l

That will tell you how many "hits" the server is currently receiving. Take a note of the number (best to run the netstat a few times and get a broader picture).

Then, as it's a virtual server, talk to the hosting company. There are Apache configuration changes that can be made, but they would affect the other users on the server as well.

Matt

[spike2131]

Thanks for your ideas. I wound up upping the number of maximum clients in the httpd.conf file. Its ok, becasue all the other virtual servers on that apache install are mine as well. I also had my hosting provider give me more TCP sockets.

Things are running a lot more smoothly now.