Surviving social-media traffic spikes: 5 simple performance tips

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Posted by JohnForsythe on July 7, 2008 at 8:23pm

I just wrote a new article called How I Survived a 2300% Traffic Increase With Drupal. It documents my experience with hitting the front page of Reddit, and some of the steps I took to make sure my site stayed online.

I also included some nice traffic graphs and statistics. If you ever wondered what kind of numbers to expect from a front-page link on a big social news site, be sure to check it out.

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John Forsythe

Comments

Im surprised reddit wouldnt

Posted by tjholowaychuk on July 7, 2008 at 8:42pm

Im surprised reddit wouldnt fish up more traffic than that! Some of our sites do that each day (granted many on here push far more responses I have handled as well). Nice writeup though! I guess this is where the throttle module comes in handy :D

Vision Media - Victoria BC Web Design

Another thing you can do is

Posted by yaph on August 4, 2016 at 6:34pm

Another thing you can do is turn off site statistics (page view count and referrer logging).
A very helpful tool for optimizing your site is the yslow plugin for firebug.

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ramiro.org

traffic

Posted by Z2222 on July 8, 2008 at 12:12am

Nice writeup. I like the idea of removing unnecessary blocks from popular pages.

On sites that get a lot of social media traffic I also turn on the "Minimum cache lifetime".

Watch out for the throttle module because I found that it made my taxonomy pages send 403 forbidden errors. I'm not sure if it was because the throttle module was interacting badly with another module, but the problem went away when I disabled throttle.

So minimum cache lifetime

Posted by eli on July 11, 2008 at 4:39pm

So minimum cache lifetime works for you? I had all kinda of weird problems pop up when I tried it on Drupal 5.

Minimum cache

Posted by Z2222 on July 12, 2008 at 12:13am

I'm using it on many Drupal 5 sites without problems. What errors are you getting?

I have it running on this site (1 hour) and this one (30 min).

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My Drupal Tutorials

I had certain cache tables

Posted by eli on August 11, 2008 at 7:24pm

I had certain cache tables that were never, ever getting cleared. See: http://drupal.org/node/227228

Other thing will be throttle

Posted by lismail on July 10, 2008 at 5:04pm

Other thing will be throttle down modules or blocks during spikes.
Also, archiving old nodes into static pages can help, even a bit.

Lucky I. Ismail

Lucky I. Ismail
http://www.adandu.com

Great article that! probably

Posted by thomjjames on August 4, 2008 at 9:57pm

Great article that!
probably worth mentioning the JS Aggregator module too, which is a similar way to the CSS aggregator.
heres the module link for Drupal 5 http://drupal.org/project/javascript_aggregator but if you're on Drupal 6 i believe its now in core, which is great news!

http://drupalsn.com/user/thomjjames

It's in there.

Posted by JohnForsythe on August 5, 2008 at 12:00pm

I actually do mention it :)

High performance

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