Rick
Posts: 52
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| Posted: 10/15/2010, 1:05 PM |
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I have a new customer who needs to be sure his website will be able to scale to something like 50,000 hits in a day with thousands over a perhaps a much smaller time, a minute or so.
This will only happen only a few days a year but there could be lost sales if it the website does not scale when needed because of Website overload and user frustration. Those few days should be predictable as they would correspond to planned events like a nationally syndicated radio talk show.
Background to understand my situation and possible concern:
I currently use a homegrown CCS Content management system, Linux/PHP/MySQL, so all non specially programmed function pages and menus are built on the fly and displayed in the browser from database data entered by the user. In other words, I do not normally manage the content, the user does using the home grown content management system. They can create the page, designate the page style within site design parameters, maintain the page content, put in meta tag data, specify page security, maintain images, etc. as needed. They also maintain the menu which is javascript creating menus based on the database menu values.
Basic Functions and Speed and Scaling Concerns of site:
1. Speed and Server Resource Issues: The number of site pages, and therefore the database, for this new site will be small (maybe 15 pages) and the number of menu items will be small but being database driven, connecting to multiple databases, and Header and Footer include pages, would be slower than straight HTML.
2. Another function is a Contact/Feedback page that will populate a database and notify the Web owner by email
3. Another function will be visitor purchases using PayPal, though it looks like it will be single item, Buy Now, type of purchases so will not be as complex as other sites I have.
Thoughts:
I was thinking to maybe do the following for efficiency and speed:
1. Change Menu to regular HTML links vs database driven javascript.
2. Still use CCS content management system for pages as pages can be easily designed, created, and maintained.
3. Once pages are created (or modified) save them as straight HTML pages to take the database out of the equation for all but the feedback/contact page.
4. Look to see how I can find a way to scale Website only when needed as client does not have a lot of money.
So my questions are:
1. Quantitatively, how much benefit would there be to going with straight HTML pages and link menus make a worthwhile difference.?
2. What other ideas or suggestions do other CCS user's have - Amazon or other Cloud, load balancing database and/or site across servers, maybe create a second site on another server , etc? My biggest concern is ease of setting up and maintaining anything in the Cloud. I took a quick look at the Amazon cloud offering and it did not seem that straight forward
I appreciate any experience sharing, feedback, or ideas the CCS community may have on this.
Thanks again.
Rick
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datadoit
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| Posted: 10/15/2010, 2:05 PM |
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Amazon's offerings are the way to go I think. Seems daunting at first
figuring out what they're presenting, but it really is quite amazing.
Ping me and I'll be happy to explain in more detail what's what.
Running a database driven site is not a big deal for large scale
enterprise-grade deployments (Ex: Google, Amazon, etc.).
Recognize that:
A: Everyone grossly over estimates their "hit" count.
B: Apache/Linux on modern hardware will easily handle it. The
bottleneck is usually the bandwidth. Hence the suggestion to use
outsourced cloud services such as Amazon Web Services.
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Rick
Posts: 52
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| Posted: 10/15/2010, 8:14 PM |
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Thanks for the reply and good info datadoit.
I will take a further look at Amazon docs to hopefully make some sense of it and then likely take you up on your kind offer to give me a little more detail.
Thanks again.
Rick
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