Posted in: Q&A

Are there any other PHP/config settings anyone would advise to handle 1K active visitors

Urgent advice please! Have a critical project that’s been sprung on me after hours for a fairly large client who is holding a week long event. They had (goodness knows why) been setup on Godaddy Managed Hosting… with 1000 active visitors trying to visit the site. It’s just a static site with WPBakery and then a password protection plugin to limit certain pages and then on each page has an iframe with the conference.
I’ve been tasked to migrate it after hours this evening to try and stablise it when it’s handling that many visitors as it was 503ing.
I’ve spun up a DO server with 16GB RAM + 6 CPUS. I’ve increased max connections to 500 based on Cloudways recommendation.
Are there any other PHP/config settings anyone would advise to handle 1K active visitors and do you think this will be enough of a spec?

Answers:

Reach out to GridPane, you might find their stack and support can handle this without issue.

Seconded. This should be no sweat.

Try to setup a CDN with full page caching and it should be able to handle all of that traffic with no issue. Since it’s a static site you definitely shouldn’t need that large of a server with the proper CDN setup.

Make sure you have proper caching at application (Swift Performance or WP Rocket) and server level (Varnish or Redis or Memcache) . If you have Cloudflare and no dynamic elements on the website, enable Edge Caching.
These two will drastically reduce the load on server.

Proper caching a good CDN etc. Would work better then PHP config at first optimize handling.

With the right stack that server should be more than sufficient.
You can load test it using something like loader.io to confirm that you’re ready for the onslaught.
Lean into their support. If that doesn’t bear fruit, lean into the support of a provider more capable of handling large scale traffic events.

 

Thanks everyone for the comments, I’ve upped the max connections, set it up as a failover (despite all of this the customer still wants to use godaddy as the primary – absolutely nuts) but it’s set on Sucuri as the backup for when shit hits the fan tomorrow morning! At least worst case if it all crashes I can switch off that IP and immediately scale it up to be a behemoth in 15 mins or so. Mind blowing that the company I’m helpings contract pretty much lies on the success of this and they opted for Godaddy shared hosting.

static html content can also be cached at the edge, via cloudflare, mitigating the server almost altogether. Their latest plugin covers this, released about a month ago.

If its truly static pages, I could run this on the tiniest, shitiest piece of crap host on the planet with a proper CDN configuration.

Just move away from Cloudways. Stop paying for hosting their dated and heavy stack.

Your can go with a managed wordpress hosting provider to avoid such issues. DO is for those who have experience of managing servers else you will end up asking for help with every issue that you may face.

Nobody can advise accurately without seeing the site and server and details of how it’s loading.I agree with others. What I will say is that I think it’s Moreso the MySQL queries for the password than the actual traffic

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