Thread

Hi

I need some help predicting what will happen to my server if a whole bunch of people hit the site at the same time.

My client is doing a national SMS campaign, where the SMS with the website address will arrive on 1-million people’s cellphones at the same time.

If 1% of those people click on the address and visit the site, there will be 10,000 people hitting the site at the same time. Obviously there would be a spike and then a fall-off, e.g. 5,000 in the first minute, 2,000 in the next minute, etc.

So I’ve got a couple of questions:

1. How many hits can an average dedicated server (Core 2 Duo; 4GB RAM) handle per minute, serving a: plain HTML file, vs a plain PHP file with no queries to the database, vs an Expression Engine page with perhaps 20 simple queries.

2. Is there an equation to help one work this out, so I don’t have to ask in future! I’m thinking of an equation that takes into account CPU cycles and RAM would be relevant.

3. Is the peak traffic the only thing to worry about, or is there a cumulative effect?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Richard

This topic is probably best to discuss with someone like Nevin at EngineHosting.com,
as it is well above and beyond the realm of technical support for EE.

I would personally love to see a followup of this thread,
but I expect you might need to look beyond the EE forums on this one..

Let’s see if anyone has experience with this on the forums. I’m also chatting to my hosting provider, and will post their response.

I think really this is going to be down to mainly your hosting provider. You are definitely going to not want to be on a shared environment though I would say.

Nevin is exceptionally knowledgeable in these matters so would definitely be better suited to answering this but really if you aren’t with EngineHosting then he will probably only be able to give general pointers as this would truly be down to your hosting provider to set up your environment in the best way possible.

I know that there are ExpressionEngine sites that have massive amounts of people hitting them every day and they handle it very very admirably. Pretty much most software, if written well, will be able to handle massive loads but only really if the server environment is set up to handle this.

Hopefully Nevin will pop in here though as I would like to hear what he has to say on this too.

Best wishes,

Mark

Further to what Andy aka ExpressionEngineer said, this is not really a Tech Support question, so I’ll move that to General. Also, it’s been pretty much said: there is no hard and fast rule, so and so many hits per second require this and that hardware, etc. It all depends.

Many hosting providers are now offering grid type hosting… so your site sits on a boatload of server resources and these grids are designed for this very reason.  If your hosting provider offers something like this or has some load balancing in place for traffic spikes… 10,000 visits in a short period of time should be no problem.