Preparing for the upcoming traffic spike

[TheBigK]

Every September, our site experiences traffic surge that lasts for about 1-2 days. We're listed #1 on Google for keywords that a large number of people search during those days. Until last year, we were on vBulletin and the site would go down intermittently because of the traffic. This year, we're on Xenforo and can't wait to see how XF performs under load. The traffic spike would be 4-6x our regular traffic and I expect about 4k-6k simultaneous visitors (not logged in members) during the peak hours.

We currently have a cloud server with 8GB RAM that handles WordPress + Xenforo gracefully and the load varies between 0.5 - 2 or 4 during peak traffic hours.

I'm considering CDN integration to take some load off the servers.

Do you have any suggestions on how to go about handling the load?

 

[Digital Doctor]

Cloudflare
MaxCDN
- both work with Xenforo.

http://xenforo.com/community/resources/maxcdn-for-xenforo.992/update?update=1875

http://xenforo.com/community/threads/what-is-cloudflare-how-does-it-help-webmasters.11105/

If the spike is coming soon .... watch it .... both options seem to take some tinkering to get working.

 

[TheBigK]

Not soon; but around middle of the month. I've used MaxCDN for our blog; but it looks like with the Akamai network backing the Rackspace Cloudfiles, I'd rather go with them. Will take some time for me to figure that out.

 

[Walter]

1) If your load now is up to 4 during peak traffic and you expect 4-6x traffic during mid September, you will face issues with load.

2) Before thinking about advanced options I would take the time to do my homework.

https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights

The report shows a score of 84 out of 100, you should easily reach 93 out of 100.

3) 8 GB RAM for a forum with only 200,000 posts is plenty. Have you optimized Mysql?

 

[RobParker]

We had something similar recently (football forum and was the end of the transfer period).

Some of the xenporta queries absolutely killed our server until we disabled it. Disabling search and the Post Ratings addon also saw a massive drop in server load as well.

So basically we found that the core XF worked great but some of the addons had issues with a lot of traffic (e.g. 4000 users in a minute period).

 

[Digital Doctor]

Some of the xenporta queries absolutely killed our server until we disabled it. Disabling search and the Post Ratings addon also saw a massive drop in server load as well.

which post ratings ?
Extended Xenforo Likes ?

So basically we found that the core XF worked great but some of the addons had issues with a lot of traffic (e.g. 4000 users in a minute period).

Now, that's alot of traffic.
I would never have expected XenPorta to work well with that amount of stress.

Need for speed

So .... which XF Addons are you using ?

 

[RobParker]

which post ratings ?
Extended Xenforo Likes ?


Now, that's alot of traffic.
I would never have expected XenPorta to work well with that amount of stress.


So .... which XF Addons are you using ?

Disabling XenPorta was the thing that made the biggest difference and it seemed like it was the RecentNews query causing most of the problems.

We definitely saw the load decrease when disabling the Post Ratings (http://xenforo.com/community/resources/post-ratings-taking-likes-to-the-next-level.410/) addon too though.

 

[TheBigK]

2) Before thinking about advanced options I would take the time to do my homework.

https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights

The report shows a score of 84 out of 100, you should easily reach 93 out of 100.

The high priority issue seems to be 'redirect'. In fact, it's a CDN that Google suggest I should remove!

3) 8 GB RAM for a forum with only 200,000 posts is plenty. Have you optimized Mysql?

Is the amount of RAM required determined by the post count? I'd like to downgrade and save on the costs. But I'd need information on what'd be the optimum RAM.

So .... which XF Addons are you using ?

I run following addons -

1. Notifications - Powered by Gritter [ Disabled most of the times ]
2. sonnb - Stop Forum Spam
3. Template Management System
4. User Rank Ribbons
5. Xenatendo - Events
6. Tag Me
7. Widget Framework

I think the last two may cause some trouble; but that's just my guess.
PS: I've asked my web host to optimize it and they've done it. Is there anything specific I need to take care of?