[thelist] Handling heavy traffic.

Daniel J. Cody djc at members.evolt.org
Wed Nov 28 12:11:00 CST 2001


Hey Roland -

What type of content are you serving out? Static HTML or 
ASP/JSP/CF/PHP/Perl? If you're serving out static HTML, 90 
requests/minute isn't too much to worry about. A decent box running 
apache can churn out much more than 1.5 reqs/sec

If you're running dynamic pages, I'd recommend a number of smaller boxes 
sitting behind some sort of load balancer or reverse proxy. There will 
be session issues to contend with possibly if you go that route though...

Another thing you should watch out for is how big are the files you'll 
be serving? Are you serving up media-rich web pages, or plain text? If 
you're trying to serve up a 100k page to 16 people at once for example, 
you've just used up an entire T-1 and it won't matter how well your 
servers are set up if there isn't enough bandwidth to feed them :)

Just some things to think about.. If you have more detailed info and 
more questions, feel free to share :)

.djc.

roland dunn wrote:

> Wonder if people could possibly help. We will hopefully be building a
> website for a client, for a promotional campaign, and will therefore be
> backed by fairly heavy media coverage. Consequently we estimate that at its
> peak it will be experiencing 90 simultaneous unique users/minute.
> 
> We will have control over platform and hosting. Database probably Oracle as
> we've used that before. We'd plan to use one small webserver and a large
> Oracle DB together with failover machines. Has anyone got any
> thoughts/opinions on what a sensible architecture is for such a site?






More information about the thelist mailing list