A site of mine is going to be featured on a very popular tech blog. I already upgraded my server to handle the traffic. What other things should I be prepared for?
Add a comment
|
4 Answers
Instead of generating pure static pages as John Conde recommends you could set up a cache like e.g. Varnish. Varnish is then taking all the requests and caches them for later use. This way the web server has to handle a lot less requests.
Apart from the other fine suggestions so far, you might also want to run your site through some benchmark tools like Google's Page Speed and YSlow – if you don't understand or want some more information about some of the results, there are some blogs that go into more depth with explanations – to see if some simple changes to what you have could translate into some cheap performance gains without throwing more money and hardware at the problem.
You could also run preemptive load and performance tests using free tools before and after any changes you make to see what the performance gain is if any.
answered Mar 16, 2012 at 22:35
-
1Dang, I was going to say something too similar to add a whole new answer. In addition to this great answer as well as the others, look back in your code for every HTTPRequest (Images, external style sheets, external javascripts, etc.) and cut them down. Use CSS Sprites: css-tricks.com/css-sprites Mar 17, 2012 at 4:23
If an article or specific pages are being featured you should create static versions of them. Serving static pages uses far less resources then dynamic pages.
answered Mar 16, 2012 at 17:00
What did you upgrade to handle the traffic? You should put it onto an ec2 server with scalr to bring up extra server instances if traffic increases plus add a load balancer
