Forum Moderators: phranque
I am asking this question because my company is building a couple of portals where we would expect a seasonal surge every 3 months or so. I was wondering how should we prepare our Linux server (we have a VPS with 5gb space) for handling such crazy surges in traffic.
Any help would be most appreciated.
Rgds
JLSeagull
If you're expecting massive amounts of geographically disperse traffic, then dispersing your data to multiple co-locations is the key. Have a setup on the East coast USA, another West Coast, one Euro, one Asia, etc... Traffic would actually be directed by either DNS servers, or rerouted once someone hits your site based on some ip to country lookup system.
Each "setup" should be properly configured with load balancers to distribute the localized load between multiple smaller webservers, and you should probably have dedicated "download servers" that just have your binaries or whatever people want to download, and don't handle anything else, no user forms, DBs, etc.
EAch location should be properly redundant, of course, and easily scalable. So, if you notice that more people hit the West Coast USA than anywhere else, put 10 servers there, with 2 fat pipes from different ISPs in there.
That's just what I'd do, since I'm actually in charge of setting up systems like that, and I don't have any faith in any single one ISP in one location. :-(
If it needs to be available 24/7, and has big requirements like that, then pay the extra bucks, and make it available, and fast! Nothing worse than starting an HTTP download of something, and not being able to resume it after the connection slowly went from 10K/s to 5 to 2 to 800 bps to 0.
I know that sounds crazy, but if you're seriously expecting 2 million downloads of at least 15MB each, along with actual proper website traffic, registrations, FAQs, CSR requests, Flash demos and whatever else every 3 months or so, and expect it to be fast, snappy, responsive and actually usable, then prepare yourself. VPS with 5GB of space won't help you, but I'm sure you can work something out with your ISP to get you a better setup, or at least speak to a consultant or experienced admin who can guide you through what to setup and what to expect on a realistic basis.
I hope I didn't scare you too much.
Oh, additionally, make sure the numbers you're getting are honest ones. I've setup environments where we were expecting "millions" of page views a day, and nothing even close to those numbers came through. Filter the marketing-speak, focus on reality. ;)
