Question

I currently have a virtual dedicated server through Media Temple that I use to run several high traffic Wordpress blogs. Both tend to receive sudden StumbleUpon traffic surges that (I m assuming) cause the server CPU to run at 100% and slow down everything. I m currently using WP-Super-Cache, S3, and CloudFront for most static files, but high traffic is still causing slowdown on the CPU.

From what I m reading, it seems like I might want to use EC2 to help the existing server when traffic spikes occur. Since I m currently using the top tier of virtual dedicated servers on Media Temple, I d like to avoid jumping to a dedicated server if possible. I get the sense that AWS might help boost the existing server s power. How would I go about doing this?

I apologize if I m using any of these terms incorrectly -- I m relatively amateur when it comes to server administration. If this isn t the best way to improve performance, what is the recommended course of action?

Answer 1

The first thing I would do is move your database server to another Media Temple VPS. After that, look to see which one is hitting 100% CPU. If it s the web server, you can create a second instance, and use a proxy to balance the load. If it s the database, you may be able to create some indexes.

Alternatively, setting up a Squid caching server in front of your web server can take off a lot of load from anonymous users. This is the approach Wikipedia takes, as the page doesn t need to be re-rendered for each user.

In either case, there isn t an easy way to spin up extra capacity on the EC2 unless your site is on the EC2 to begin with.

Answer 2

There is just 3 type of instance you can have. Other than that they cant give you any more "server power". You will need to do some load balancing. There are software Load Balancers, such as HAProxy, NginX, which are not bad, if you dont want to deal with that, you can do DNS Round Robin, after setting up the high load blogs on different machines.

You should be able to scale them, that s the beauty of AWS, scaling.

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