I'm about to benchmark a site's performance under load and looking for advice on a rule of thumb for how much higher the peak traffic is than the low part of the trough.
I'm not sure if anyone has rules of thumb they've already developed, if so, great! I thought we could try to share some data points and see if there are any trends.
- The site I'm doing the benchmarking on is a fairly large site with an international appeal. It's peak hour is almost exactly double the lowest time of day.
- My personal blog (which is not hugely popular, but gets some traffic) is about 4.5 times busier during the peak hour than the slowest hour.
- groups.drupal.org (i.e. this site) is again almost exactly twice as busy during the peak hour vs. the slowest hour.
Another way to look at those is what percent of the traffic comes during the peak hour - for these three sites they are fairly consistent in this regard: between 5.5% and 6%.
And of course the shape of the curve in between makes a bit of a difference as well.
All three curves seem fairly similar.
So, what are your numbers? What rules of thumb do you use to decide how many requests you should be able to handle in a peak unit of time?
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Comments
It depends, I guess
Here's ours from last monday.
about...
Those like like about 10,000 at the trough hour to about 125,000 at the peak hour? And what was the total number of page views for that day? Note that you can set the timespan to be the whole month and the "Click" view will still show visitors per hour but averaged across the month which may be more reliable.
knaddison blog | Morris Animal Foundation
A bit more than 2 million page views
I'm not authorized to show more data, but our trends are basically as in the screenshot. There are days that we get less visits, days that we get more, but the trends follow the same pattern. Ours is an online magazine about videogames in spanish. The low traffic happens when people sleep in Spain. This site is not running Drupal, but it will very soon. I'm working on it.
Here's another screenshot (this time in english) that shows visitors instead of page views.
[EDIT] Trying to attach the screenshot I got the spam error, and I had to pass captcha form. :(
don't use a rule of thumb unless you have no data
unless you have no real data to analyse, don't use a rule of thumb.
get the sites logs and run them through a script that looks for the minutes with the biggest number of hits.
i'd advise against using any unit bigger than a minute. one bad minute can turn into a much longer period of sluggish/unresponsive site behaviour.
thanks
Sure, that seems like a great track to follow when possible but somehow it's not always possible. Rules of thumb are for situations when that's not possible - because the logs aren't good enough, because you're in a meeting and want an answer now instead of in a few days, etc.
knaddison blog | Morris Animal Foundation