Using EC2 Load Balancing with Existing Wordpress Blog - wordpress

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?

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.

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.

Related

Serving two websites written in Google Go within a single VM

I have a VM from Digital Ocean. It currently has two domains linked to the VM.
I do not use any other web server but Golang's built in http module. Performance-wise I like it, and I feel like I have a full control over it.
Currently I am using a single Go program that has multiple websites built in.
http.HandleFunc("test.com/", serveTest)
http.HandleFunc("123.com/", serve123)
http.HandleFunc("/", serve123)
As they are websites, Go program is using port 80 for that.
And the problem is when I am trying to update only 1 website, I have to recompile whole thing as they are written in the same code.
1) Is there a way to make it hot-swappable only with Golang (without Nginx or Apache)
2) What would be a standard best practice?
Thank you so much!
Well, you can do hotswapping in go, but I really wouldn't want to do that unless really ncecessary as the complexity added isn't negligible (and I'm not talking about code).
You can have something close with a kind of proxy that would sit in front of the program and do a graceful swap whenever your binary change : the principle is to have the binary on one port, the proxy on another. When a new binary is ready, you run it on another port, and make the proxy redirect to the new port, then gracefully shutdown the old one.
There was a tool for that in Go that I can't remember the name of…
EDIT: not the one I had in mind, but close call https://github.com/rcrowley/goagain
Personnal advice: use a reverse proxy for that, its much more simple to do. My personnal setup is to use h2o to terminate SSL, HTTP2, etc, and send the requests to the various websites running on the background. Not only Go ones, though, but also PHP ones, a Gitlab instance, etc. Its much more flexible, and the performance penalty of the proxy is small…

ASP.NET hosting with unlimited single-node scalability

Since this question is from a user's (developer's) perspective I figured it might fit better here than on Server Fault.
I'd like an ASP.NET hosting that meets the following criteria:
The application seemingly runs on a single server (so no need to worry about e.g. session state or even static variables)
There is an option to scale storage, memory, DB size and CPU-power up and down on demand, in an "unlimited" way
I researched but there seems not to be such a platform, that completely abstracts the underlying architecture away and thus has the ease of use of a simple shared hosting but "unlimited" scalability.
"Single server" and "scalability" are mutually exclusive, I'm afraid. But a good load-balancer will apply affinity to requests so you don't need to needlessly double-cache data on multiple servers.
However, well-designed web applications are easy to port to a multiple-server scenario.
I think your best option is something like Windows Azure Websites (separate from Azure Web Workers) which run on a VM you don't have access to. The VM itself provides enough power as-is necessary to run your website, so you don't need to worry about allocating extra CPU power or RAM.
Things like SQL Server are handled separately, but is very cheap to run, and you can drag a slider to give yourself more storage space.
This can be still accomplished by using a cloud host like www.gearhost.com. Apps live in the cloud and by default get 1 node worker so session stickiness is maintained. You can then scale that application larger workers to accomplish what you need, all while maintaining HA and LB. Even further you can add multiple web workers. Each visitor is tied to a particular node to maintain session state even though you might have 10 workers for example. It's an easy and cheap way to scale a site with 100 visitors to many million in just a few clicks.

Planning server infrastructure when hosting duplicated web-product over multiple servers

We have a web-application product that we sell to companies that is hosted at our servers.
The product contains couple of web applications, windows services and SQL server db.
Right now we have only one client that uses our product. We have two servers - one for the web apps and services and other for the db.
In order to add the product to another client, we have to 'duplicate' all the apps and db and run in separately.
As we started expanding and some companies will require more server power then others, I need to plan the servers infrastructure.
Having two servers for each client sounds ridiculous. Hosting costs will be huge. What will happen when I'll have 10 clients? And probably some servers will take more power than others, leaving servers using 30% from their capacity while others use 70%.
One thing I really care about is separating the DB from each product so in case of server compromise, only one db will be at risk.
So... I thought about Virtual Machines...
Does it sounds right?
Do I need two super servers to hold virtual machine instances? (one for web and other for db?)
What about Load balancing / etc..?
Will it require more maintenance time only because I use virtual machines?
Are there any hardware recommendations?
Any help will be appreciated
Many thanks
Virtual Machines is definitely the safest way to separate clients and will allow you the flexibility to allocate a specific percentage of resources to specific clients.
However, using separate processes on the same physical machine will perform better (but not always significantly) and will allow more dynamic use of resources (i.e., if one spikes, it will use the resources it needs). This setup will not allow you to control the resource allocation nearly as easily though. You'll also have to build your own monitoring tools to see and analyze what processes (clients) are using what resources (piggyback on perfmon).
Using separate processes also is dangerous if your application wasn't designed for this. Anywhere the application caches data on the file system or accesses anything besides memory and the database needs to be thoroughly scrubbed to make sure data from clients is not co-mingled or shared.
Separate virtual machines is more work to manage--each one is pretty much like it's own computer. So you have to manage all the VM's plus the physical machine.
You may also want to consider hosting in a more dynamic environment like Amazon AWS or Microsoft's Azure which will allow you to more easily scale up/down as necessary than a VM at a traditional host.

Assets Management in a clustered environment

I have a content management system running on a web server, that among others allows the user to upload assets like images, files, etc to the server.
The problem i have is that there will be 2 servers running behind a load balancer and i am trying to find an efficient way to handle the assets management.
The question i have is:
Will the assets be uploaded to one server every time? Or is there a chance that the images/files will end up into server1 or server2 depending on the load?
How to i serve the images if i don't know on which server they end up in? Will i have to keep the directories of these assets (images/files) synchronized between the two servers?
Thanks,
Synchronization is a tough problem to crack. You can do ad-hoc synchronization using Couchdb but that requires good knowledge of the low-level issues. Therefore you need to choose a write master.
DRDB
You could look at DRDB :D Use one server as the write-master and the other as the slave. Then you can server content from both. This approach is amazing for database-pairs.
Note: seperating your code and URL's for write-master and serve-only will be anoying
Couchdb
You could use couchdb but I think that might be overkill. This is for the LARGE amounts of data and high-levels of fault tolerance.
NFS
You could export the asset directory on the write-master as an nfs drive and import it from the other computer. But in this case it wouldn't be load-balanced in all cases -- i.e., only if the files are cached by the slave. You could use a third computer as an NFS server -- this would allow you to scale to more web-servers.
A central NFS server might just be your best solution as you can do without a write-master as every front-end server can perform writes. This is the approach I would use unless I am thinking of going past the peta-byte range :P

Harvesting Dynamic HTTP Content to produce Replicating HTTP Static Content

I have a slowly evolving dynamic website served from J2EE. The response time and load capacity of the server are inadequate for client needs. Moreover, ad hoc requests can unexpectedly affect other services running on the same application server/database. I know the reasons and can't address them in the short term. I understand HTTP caching hints (expiry, etags....) and for the purpose of this question, please assume that I have maxed out the opportunities to reduce load.
I am thinking of doing a brute force traversal of all URLs in the system to prime a cache and then copying the cache contents to geodispersed cache servers near the clients. I'm thinking of Squid or Apache HTTPD mod_disk_cache. I want to prime one copy and (manually) replicate the cache contents. I don't need a federation or intelligence amongst the slaves. When the data changes, invalidating the cache, I will refresh my master cache and update the slave versions, probably once a night.
Has anyone done this? Is it a good idea? Are there other technologies that I should investigate? I can program this, but I would prefer a configuration of open source technologies solution
Thanks
I've used Squid before to reduce load on dynamically-created RSS feeds, and it worked quite well. It just takes some careful configuration and tuning to get it working the way you want.
Using a primed cache server is an excellent idea (I've done the same thing using wget and Squid). However, it is probably unnecessary in this scenario.
It sounds like your data is fairly static and the problem is server load, not network bandwidth. Generally, the problem exists in one of two areas:
Database query load on your DB server.
Business logic load on your web/application server.
Here is a JSP-specific overview of caching options.
I have seen huge performance increases by simply caching query results. Even adding a cache with a duration of 60 seconds can dramatically reduce load on a database server. JSP has several options for in-memory cache.
Another area available to you is output caching. This means that the content of a page is created once, but the output is used multiple times. This reduces the CPU load of a web server dramatically.
My experience is with ASP, but the exact same mechanisms are available on JSP pages. In my experience, with even a small amount of caching you can expect a 5-10x increase in max requests per sec.
I would use tiered caching here; deploy Squid as a reverse proxy server in front of your app server as you suggest, but then deploy a Squid at each client site that points to your origin cache.
If geographic latency isn't a big deal, then you can probably get away with just priming the origin cache like you were planning to do and then letting the remote caches prime themselves off that one based on client requests. In other words, just deploying caches out at the clients might be all you need to do beyond priming the origin cache.

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