Boosting web server performance
February 5, 2007
Last year (2006) we figured we had a unique idea — lets podcast the Superbowl Commercials for the expats who live in Hong Kong and other places that we cover through our main site GeoExpat.Com. We had no clue about what would happen next — 40 thousand+ visitors showed up on DevLib.Org and downloaded over 2TB worth of videos in a week. Well, that brought our server down to its knees and along with the hassles of making sure that the videos got uploaded, handling a database crash and dealing with the excess bandwidth, we were not sure if this should be repeated again — specially since the folks over at YouTube had become the destination of choice since last year.
But, common sense did not prevail and we said “what the heck, lets do it again and lets do it with some better technology”.
In this post, we list some of the technologies used and how we optimized our server to handle over 80K visitors and 4TB of downloads in two days.
