http://blogcritics.org/ A sinister cabal of superior bloggers on music, books, film, popular culture, politics, and technology - updated continuously. en Copyright 2005-2007 by the authors Sun, 12 Oct 2008 17:27:15 EDT http://backend.userland.com/rss Blogcritics.org custom software http://blogcritics.org/archives/2006/01/27/175740.php#comment-756194 Actually, we just got slashdotted again, and this time you could not even notice a speed difference. The biggest thing I did was plug the server directly into the gateway, and bam, no more bandwidth problems on 2Mbps up line. Just make sure you have a firewall on the front end server enabled, and that combined with my above specs, an additional server thrown in, some page whitespace trimming and slight static content conversion made the site perform beautifully at thousands of hits per second, as I said no difference in speed at all! 756194@blogcritics.org Sun, 12 Oct 2008 17:27:15 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2006/01/27/175740.php#comment-751387 I was a slashdot effect victim recently. My website, thecoffeedek.com had a great story and got slashdotted, and here's how it went with 5 load-balancing lighttpd web servers with an optimized-configuration apache2 as a proxy front (using the proxy mod that does load balancing): First, the server loads during the peak of the hits (around 12,000 users per second) never made the server load (according to htop) reach above 0.1, and the reason is because the 2Mbps bandwidth buckled almost instantly. Once the bandwidth was hosed, the servers had nothing to worry about since over half the clients couldn't even get through. But the ones that did hardly even affected the cluster, which on a very high amount of images per page and multiple database hits per page (wordpress) is quite astounding. And the boxes aren't all that great, they're processing speeds and RAM are: Server 1(front end): 2x800MHz, 768MB Server 2: 2x800Mhz, 186MB Server 3: 1.6GHz, 512MB Server 4: 2.4GHz, 1GB Server 5: 1.6GHz, 384MB (RAMBUS, too) So the machines aren't optimal, but they're in a perfect layer 4 cluster, and if the bandwidth were higher they could have easily handled the loads with very little latency. I disabled mod_gzip (or whatever it is now) on account of cluster confusion and processing difficulties. And one last thing: server 1 also is the MySQL database server, NFS, and NIS for the other nodes, so for every reverse proxy he was also getting hit several times (will be fixed in the future), but in its defense it has 2 NICs, one for internet requests only, and one for internal DB/NFS/NIS requests, and again as the most monitored of the systems the load never topped 0.1 average, with 50 days of uptime (still inaccurate because kexec resets the uptime count). Thats just my 2 cents. If you visit thecoffeedesk.com you can see the server ID at the bottom, or just append #server to the URL. And in the future, a text only backup on coral is overdue. Thanks, Anthony 751387@blogcritics.org Tue, 23 Sep 2008 23:04:04 EDT