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I don't think a load balancer is really necessary. I weathered being front-paged on HN for several hours just fine using a 512 Linode VPS. It was a pretty sto
by polyfractal 15y ago
I don't think a load balancer is really necessary. I weathered being front-paged on HN for several hours just fine using a 512 Linode VPS. It was a pretty stock-vanilla nginx + PHP-FastCGI + mySQL server. Hardly broke a sweat.
I think you should probably look into the configuration of your server, rather than throwing more hardware at the problem.
- hartleybrody 15y agoI'd love a "how to configure your server to make the front page without breaking a sweat, or throwing hardware at the problem" post. I kinda just followed the default rackspace guidance when I was setting up apache, but I'm sure there's room for improvement there.
- polyfractal 15y agoI basically followed the Linode Wiki guide to setting up Arch Linux with nginx: http://library.linode.com/web-servers/nginx/php-fastcgi/arch-linux http://library.linode.com/web-servers/nginx/php-fastcgi/arch... I made a few tweaks, but it was pretty vanilla. I also used Amazon's CloudFront to host my gzipped CSS/JS.
- hartleybrody 15y agoOut of curiosity, were you running wordpress? I feel like it's a pretty big memory hog...
- polyfractal 15y agoTo be fair, I wasn't running WordPress. My webapp was a lot of client-side javascript and a JSON API backend. So it was probably a lot more lightweight than a big WordPress setup with a lot of plugins. Did you have something like WPSuperCache installed? That can help a lot by pre-caching all your pages into static html.
- hartleybrody 15y agoYah, I just installed one. Having spent a little more time looking at the problem since I wrote this post, I think my Achilles heel was memory usage by Wordpress. Once I dial that down I should easily be able to handle another surge without extra hardware. Thanks for the info!