Surviving the digg effect

[pukupi]

I'm wondering what measures FQ has in place to handle the digg effect?

[Terra]

It depends on your sites content...

If your site is heavily dependent on Dynamic Content, like a CMS, Blog, etc, then we will notify you ASAP that you need to convert it to static content... In the meantime, if your site overwhelms the server, then we have no choice but to disable the Dynamic Content until you can make the necessary changes...

Overall, there is no set rule as each 'digg', 'slashdot', etc effect has a different loading effect on the server... Most of the time, we can keep the site active by employing various techniques at the server level and we really make a valiant effort in doing so... However, if the loading is so great, then we cannot allow your site to degrade the performance of others...

If you know that you are about to receive a large amount of traffic, perhaps due to an advertised promotion, then you would have time to move your site to either a MQS system (Managed QuestServer) or a multi-node Cluster system (Requires a 2 week lead time)... In short, it is wise to plan ahead, instead of waiting to see if the site needs to be shutdown and moved to a MQS system while the event is happening...

[pukupi]

I'm not planning on getting heavily dugg or slashdotted any time soon but a colleague recently got slammed with digg so it's good to know you have some strategy in place for what can be unpredictable heavy traffic.

MQS sounds interesting. Do you have more details?

[Terra]

Surviving a 'digg' or a good 'slashdotting' is an achievement the entire team can be proud of because there is a lot of frantic work that happens behind the scenes... The ones we couldn't handle were with the Drupal and WordPress type sites as they are extremely heavy on a server even with moderate traffic... Having them 'slashdotted' turns the CPU and disk I/O into molten metal trying to keep up with the hundreds of thousands of processing steps just to create one page...

Please email the Service Desk for more info on the MQS offering...

[Lensman]

Terra,

Not that my pathetic little site is likely to be Slashdotted or anything, but do you have any suggestions or pointers on how to get WordPress type functionality without beating the snot out of the servers? It seems that this type of site doesn't convert to static readily, at least to my very limited knowledge.

[Terra]

I'm afraid I don't other than figuring out which pages are getting heavily hit, going to them and using saving the page as HTML along with the images and then uploading them via FTP... You then might have to add or remove some of the mod_rewrite rules so that WordPress doesn't intercept those pages...

In the end, it really is something that your webmaster should have some sort of emergency procedure to handle that situation...

[sylvano]

Are there any tools available to determine the load one's CMS is creating on the server?

[Arthur]

Are there any tools available to determine the load one's CMS is creating on the server? Unfortunately not, there are no simple tools to do that.

Any CMS, or any application that creates its pages dynamically really, has the potential to overload the server. A lot depends on the complexity of the code, the number of plugins, etc., but also on the traffic patterns (time between visits, for example).

-Arthur

[phppete]

Smarty template system has a caching feature that is unbelievably easy to activate. The slight extra resource use for Smarty is dramatically offset by the caching. Somebody without PHP knowledge can work with Smarty, if you know a very small amount of PHP its even easier.

[hobbes]

Pete - you're back! Good to (virtually) see you.

[phppete]

Pete - you're back! Good to (virtually) see you.

Thanks :) I can imagine the FQ staff are saying 'oh no that idiot is back, I wonder who he will abuse next!'.

[Nyxie]

Thanks :) I can imagine the FQ staff are saying 'oh no that idiot is back, I wonder who he will abuse next!'.

I think you set off an alarm, because two of them appeared in the forum right behind you.:confuz:

[Juan G]

Smarty template system has a caching feature that is unbelievably easy to activate. The slight extra resource use for Smarty is dramatically offset by the caching. Somebody without PHP knowledge can work with Smarty, if you know a very small amount of PHP its even easier.
Thank you, that's good advice to improve performance and reduce server load. BTW, welcome back to the fight, Rick... er... Pete. Good to see you contributing to the community again. :wink:

Another possibility to prevent the Digg effect would be to use Movable Type's HTML static publishing; we can disable any additional dynamic features when the traffic is too high. MT also provides optional PHP dynamic publishing, and I've just seen MT uses the Smarty system that you mention to process the templates, including caching.

[DogAndPony]

As one who's had an FQ site (static pages) Slashdotted, I can vouch for their ability to keep it afloat with little strain. Can't testify as to any frantic behind-the-scenes efforts, though. I just assume that's really happening.

Now if I can just get my next web site Slashdotted... :kewl: