Traffic Spike Concerns

NPR is about to run a national story about a client of mine. In response, the client is worried about the spike bringing down the website.

We are running:

Modx 1.00
Foxycart 5.1
Media Temple Grid Service account

In an effort to guard against a massive spike bring the service down, do you have any suggestions? Such as upgrading Modx to 1.01, upgrading the media temple account to the MySQL grid container (dedication ram for mysql), etc. As it is the holiday season, we are afraid to make changes but wanted to know where our greatest risk lay in the architecture.

Thanks in advance,
Marten

Hello,

I would suggest upgrading to the latest version (1.0.2) to take advantage of bug fixes and manager improvements. It’s not likely to help much with a load spike.

The main thing I can think is keep tabs on your resources with the MT Grid service. It’s more or less shared hosting so they may cut you off if your site has a massive load spike. VPS or Dedicated servers they don’t care as much as any affects are isolated to your server vs affecting other clients.

The best suggestions I can make for preparing your site is to use yslow and try to maximize your score. They recommend enabling expires (http://svn.modxcms.com/docs/display/Evo1/Friendly+URL+Solutions#FriendlyURLSolutions-SolvingInternetExplorerWoes) and I would suggest a two week window for most files. They recommend enabling gzip which isn’t bad, but bewared it’s double edged... Gzip increases server load to compress files on the fly, but it also reduces download time which can be nice. If MT support gzip you may want to turn it on (http://salscode.com/web-resources/gzip-htaccess).

Beyond the above cache as many pages as you can and you should be in decent shape for whatever traffic you expect. If you don’t/can’t cache alot then try to get more resources for mysql.

If you have any questions on the above let me know, others many have some other suggestions.