World AIDS Day server load handled
messaggio studios has the privilege of hosting several major civil society web sites that deal with HIV and AIDS. This means that every year, from about 29 November to 2 December, the traffic surge is impressive. How did the team do this year?
"Preparation is important" says Romain Petit, head of our Web and IT services. "We do many things slightly differently during this period to handle the sudden spike."
Among the things that are done differently is the way we stock our pages. Usually, our web pages are dynamic, written in PHP and stocked on a MySql database. The traditional means of handling loads in these scenarios is to simply load balance across several servers. Well, we do that, but we also do more to ensure that the servers hold up but also that the surfing experience is 100% satisfactory. How we do it is by converting our sites to static pages for the duration of the peak. This is a very server and labor intensive process but it allows us to serve up pages at HTML speeds rather than database speeds.
In fact, ironically, some of the pages load up faster during these peak periods than they do during the non-static, off-peak period.
We also try to keep our traffic split between our Paris and our Los Angeles servers so as to, once again, reduce 'time to display' for users on either side of the Atlantic.
As we write this article, our loads are coming down. We expect some ongoing traffic throughout the day today (2 December) but then loads will really come down to normal by tomorrow.
Romain and his team can rest easier now. "There is no way the server is coming down on my watch!" he adds.