The Sign of a Robust AV Website

So I log on to post some more articles at Audioholics.com only to be presented with a rather slow website. What's up? Looking into the issue I find out that our article on 1080p and the Acuity of Human Vision has been Slashdotted.

So what's any adept site owner to do when presented with a nice /.-ing? Max out the site! Try to publish more articles! See how far you can take it!

So that's what I'm doing. I mean, what the heck - why not. We were able to post 2 articles while being slashdotted so far - now that's cool. (We also made some quick site adjustments to make sure our site was able to stay afloat during the "traffic storm" but all in all we seemed to do very well.)

That's better than many fare - I've seen lots of sites have to replace the page with a simply "Sorry we can't handle the load" page. Not here.

Plone certainly didn't falter. Varnish ran the front end very well - and let me transmit some of the "inner geek" expressed by our two website developers during the swell:

alan: varnish is spiking with 200 req/second
alan: we are serving 1MB/sec through varnish
alan: 184 req/second!
alan: apaches httpd cant keep up
alan: can you purge that url from varnish?
Sean: purged
alan: again
Sean: purged again
alan: maybe we don't need so many apache child workers
Sean: yeah, I'll leave maxclients up, but reduce the children

It's at this point that my "geek light" came on and I knew I was dealing with professionals... And that I was out of my league. AND that I was in good hands.

So what's the moral of this story? Simple:

• Load on Varnish/Plone box w/ authoring zeoclient = .08
• Load on ad server =  12
  

We need a new ad server... The website is still up, and we're still posting. I love it.