If you noticed my blog (or more likely, the Moodoo website) was going a bit slow here and there yesterday.. well it’s because my good friend Ryan’s website was getting hammered. I don’t think any clients were affected for too long thanks to our Nagios monitoring and swift action (despite the fact I was knee deep in a remodel at the time).
In case you’re wondering who Ryan is, he’s basically Sabrienix’s web design guy – long ago I discovered that while I enjoy doing web design as a pass time, I don’t care for it enough to get paid doing it (ironic really, that Sabrienix started life as a design/media company, and now neither of us want to do design). He’s also an SEO/web marketing genius, which his site RetroHive is a testament to – zero to ~100k monthly visitors in the space of a couple months is nothing to smirk at… sales plug: if you want this, give us a call. 
So anyway, despite the fact our Apache server is severely optimized, we were worried about port saturation first and foremost… until it became apparent that php/fastcgi and timthumb.php are a terrible mix, despite the “caching” that goes on. I’ll be rewriting timthumb to make use of WP-SuperCache style mod_rewrite caching – that is if a thumbnail’s already generated I don’t want the PHP interpreter being loaded at all.
Our next step will be configuring a dedicated server for this site alone – if Ryan’s marketing skills in the first few months are anything to go by we’re going to need some industrial equipment to keep this site online through it’s growth. It’ll be great practice for Sabrienix – we’re pretty good at optimizing Apache, but there’s always more to learn… and as it grows it might reach the point where we need a cluster, which will be a great experience.
In the mean time though, we’ve neutered his site to try and keep the bandwidth levels down on the server until we arrange for it’s own server.
