sim.plified.com

On Sunday, August 10, one week ago, we experienced our first hit from Digg.  We had talked about the possibility of being Dugg but were by no means prepared for what that meant.  On our biggest day previous to this we saw a max of around 9k visitors.  Looking at the graph below you can see we far exceeded that topping out at almost 50k visitors on that one day.

So what.. people get dugg all the time, what's the big whip?  Well, currently PT is sitting on a shared virtual host with only 256MB of RAM.  This hit should of sent our server home crying and returning all sorts of "sorry, we were not prepared for you" types of errors.

However, thanks to the good foresight of our kung fu server master, Jay Janssen, the server did not come grinding to halt, but continued to gracefully serve pages as the onslaught of visitors continued.  Jay is a mysql guru who works for Yahoo!  (he's also a good friend and my roommate from R.I.T.).

The secret sauce was lighttp, a server component that allows you to bypass apache for non dynamic requests (e.g. jpg, js, css files).  See the graph below and you can see what lighttp did for us as the requests/sec. continued to mount.  lighttp skyrocket up to 110 req/sec. while apache laid low.

Long story short, apache would have never been able to handle 110 req/sec on our current configuration and our site would have been dugg and buried.

Kudos to Jay for his great work on keeping Pattern Tap alive and well.

You can find out more about Jay and his server kung fu at: http://mysqlguy.net/

Technorati Tags: PatternTap,Pattern Tap,apache,lighttp