Good advice. But I think the context here is that there's a sudden spike of traffic from unexpected popularity that's likely to die out within a day or two. The mission is simply to survive that period.
If you're on Amazon EC2 or similar, it becomes phenomenally cheap to throw hardware at the problem. Running a single medium instance is $0.175/hour. If you need need to go from 5 servers to 50 servers for two days, it's just $420 to get out of a 48 hour jam. Need to upgrade to the beefiest 68 GB, 28 ECU RDS instance while your'e at it? $125 for 48 hours.
Performance tuning for 100x load that may never come again is usually hard to justify, so just know what your outs are if you're lucky enough to be swamped with traffic.
However, just be sure that you know how to scale out quickly and you can launch new instances (hopefully automatically). On most days, our eCommerce business gets by on just a couple of servers, but we have our autoscaling rules in place that will spin up/down servers within a few minutes.
Be sure to test regularly. Having a server boot up and add itself to the load balancer with old code/configs can wreak havoc on your database.
If you're on Amazon EC2 or similar, it becomes phenomenally cheap to throw hardware at the problem. Running a single medium instance is $0.175/hour. If you need need to go from 5 servers to 50 servers for two days, it's just $420 to get out of a 48 hour jam. Need to upgrade to the beefiest 68 GB, 28 ECU RDS instance while your'e at it? $125 for 48 hours.
Performance tuning for 100x load that may never come again is usually hard to justify, so just know what your outs are if you're lucky enough to be swamped with traffic.
However, just be sure that you know how to scale out quickly and you can launch new instances (hopefully automatically). On most days, our eCommerce business gets by on just a couple of servers, but we have our autoscaling rules in place that will spin up/down servers within a few minutes.
Be sure to test regularly. Having a server boot up and add itself to the load balancer with old code/configs can wreak havoc on your database.