Viral social media topic and constant crashes

[browndog]

Hi there,

I recently wrote a throw together article my daughter suggested that has gone viral. When I originally posted it, it was shared widely. Yesterday a FB group with 1,1 million followers linked to it. For the past day my site has been up and down constantly, I am beyond stressed. I recently moved to a semi-dedicated hoping it would speed up my site and give me some space to increase traffic, but every single day the site has crashed, today has been the worst.

So basically, my site usually has around 30-50 people at any given time, today it went to 70 people, and the server just coulnd't cope. Is that normal for a semi-dedicated? Their response has been...

Currently, your PHP_FPM configuration is set to 6 child processes, therefore, once the 7th request is made, the website will put the request on hold until a socket is released.

If we increase the PHP-FPM processes, this could cause the allocation of your server's resources and the services running might stall.

Therefore, we could offer you to have a Nginx reverse proxy installed, which will provide you with a cache of both dynamic and static content.

[browndog]

Once the Nginx was installed it helped for a while, but the site eventually crashed and continues to crash. Right now it is down again.

[graeme_p]

What does semi-dedicated actually mean?

How many page views a second does demand it peak at?

What is your site running on? It might be possible to cache dynamic content better in your app rather than Nginx.

It might be possible to optimise the Nginx caching. [nginx.com...]

[justpassing]

Yes semi-dedicated, doesn't really mean anything.

May be it's a VPS, but in that case you still have dedicated resources.

Or may be you meant managed dedicated server ? A dedicated server, which you are not managing yourself directly.

If we increase the PHP-FPM processes, this could cause the allocation of your server's resources and the services running might stall.

If your "server" is running short beyond 6 PHP FPM child, this should be a really tiny server.

What do you call "crash" exactly? What about your logs? There is certainly an error message explaining more precisely the reason of the problem. (crash is different from inaccessible)

What CMS are you using?

[edited by: justpassing at 10:37 am (utc) on Sep 23, 2018]

[keyplyr]

... 70 people, and the server just coulnd't cope

That sounds extremely under performing.

From what you describe, I assume every requested page is a php instance?

[NickMNS]

As short term fix you could try using Cloudflare or similar service. The CDN will cache your site and serve the pages from the cache thus relieving some of the load on your server. I'm not sure if it will be enough. There is a free plan, it takes minutes to setup, so it is likely worth a try. But as other have commented:

That sounds extremely under performing.

[browndog]

The site uses Wordpress, I have around 900 articles, so it's not overly large.

I just looked at their site and it says VPS and this is what I get.

65GB SSD Space
4TB Bandwidth
2 CPU Cores
4GB DDR4 RAM
Fully Managed
Premium Support
cPanel/WHM
Free Setup
Sorry, I'm not particularly techy. They have emailed me back and say it's an issue with my database and I should hire a developer to sort it out, but this only started when I moved to the new host. I was on a shared plan with the previous host and never experienced issues. I only moved because I'd started to outgrow my plan and their sales team wasn't that helpful in discussing where to go from there (I wanted to upgrade).

This is the message they're showing me, which means nothing at all.

[23-Sep-2018 11:02:52 UTC] WordPress database error Unknown column 'ip' in 'field list' for query INSERT INTO `wp_redirection_404` (`url`, `created`, `ip`, `agent`, `referrer`) VALUES ('/ezoic_adloc/?ap1=2191&ap2=2187&al1=2022&al2=2036&pxb=104&reas=30percentviewability&u=https://www.example.com/example-article&ss=768x880&as1=300x250&as2=300x250&pl=null', '2018-09-23 11:02:52', '114.198.91.134', 'Mozilla/5.0 (iPad; CPU OS 11_4_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Mobile/15G77 [FBAN/FBIOS;FBAV/189.0.0.44.93;FBBV/124150883;FBDV/iPad5,3;FBMD/iPad;FBSN/iOS;FBSV/11.4.1;FBSS/2;FBCR/;FBID/tablet;FBLC/en_GB;FBOP/5;FBRV/0]', 'https://example.com/example-article') made by require('wp-blog-header.php'), require_once('wp-includes/template-loader.php'), do_action('template_redirect'), WP_Hook->do_action, WP_Hook->apply_filters, WordPress_Module->template_redirect, RE_404::create

Several years ago when my forums were popular I used to have 100 people online at any given time just on the forums alone, I just don't understand why these issues are occurring here.