Surviving social-media traffic spikes: 5 simple performance tips

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JohnForsythe's picture

I just wrote a new article called How I Survived a 2300% Traffic Increase With Drupal. It documents my experience with hitting the front page of Reddit, and some of the steps I took to make sure my site stayed online.

I also included some nice traffic graphs and statistics. If you ever wondered what kind of numbers to expect from a front-page link on a big social news site, be sure to check it out.

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John Forsythe

Comments

Im surprised reddit wouldnt

tjholowaychuk's picture

Im surprised reddit wouldnt fish up more traffic than that! Some of our sites do that each day (granted many on here push far more responses I have handled as well). Nice writeup though! I guess this is where the throttle module comes in handy :D

Vision Media - Victoria BC Web Design

Another thing you can do is

yaph's picture

Another thing you can do is turn off site statistics (page view count and referrer logging).
A very helpful tool for optimizing your site is the yslow plugin for firebug.

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ramiro.org

traffic

Z2222's picture

Nice writeup. I like the idea of removing unnecessary blocks from popular pages.

On sites that get a lot of social media traffic I also turn on the "Minimum cache lifetime".

Watch out for the throttle module because I found that it made my taxonomy pages send 403 forbidden errors. I'm not sure if it was because the throttle module was interacting badly with another module, but the problem went away when I disabled throttle.

So minimum cache lifetime

eli's picture

So minimum cache lifetime works for you? I had all kinda of weird problems pop up when I tried it on Drupal 5.

Minimum cache

Z2222's picture

I'm using it on many Drupal 5 sites without problems. What errors are you getting?

I have it running on this site (1 hour) and this one (30 min).

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My Drupal Tutorials

I had certain cache tables

eli's picture

I had certain cache tables that were never, ever getting cleared. See: http://drupal.org/node/227228

Other thing will be throttle

lismail's picture

Other thing will be throttle down modules or blocks during spikes.
Also, archiving old nodes into static pages can help, even a bit.

Lucky I. Ismail

Lucky I. Ismail
http://www.adandu.com

Great article that! probably

thomjjames's picture

Great article that!
probably worth mentioning the JS Aggregator module too, which is a similar way to the CSS aggregator.
heres the module link for Drupal 5 http://drupal.org/project/javascript_aggregator but if you're on Drupal 6 i believe its now in core, which is great news!


http://drupalsn.com/user/thomjjames

It's in there.

JohnForsythe's picture

I actually do mention it :)

oops sorry missed that bit,

High performance

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