Hi all,
We've been working with Tessitura Network on several large onsales for our new outdoor venue, but our front end website keeps crashing. Our web developer has run numerous load tests on the site, and has a load balancer with the load spread across three web servers. He is not hosting at his location, but is using a hosting provider (I'm not sure who he is using currently, but have asked).
Last week the demand was far higher than any of us could have anticipated, but this week we saw 1/10th of the traffic and the website still crashed. For reference, last week we had over 15,000 people in our waiting room at the high point, this week we had about 1,500 at the high point.
Can anyone recommend a website hosting service that can handle huge spikes like that?
Thanks!
Marley
I agree with Nich. You could load balance the website all you want, but if there is only one database server that could be a bottleneck. especially if using something like Entity Framework and it is implemented poorly. I would probably have him map out all the software and hardware he is using.
Also where is the Tessitura Web API hosted as compared to the web server? Remote API calls to Tessitura can be "costly" depending on how many calls are implemented, any bandwidth bottlenecks, lack of caching, and/or lack of http compression.
Hi all! Thanks for the great responses.
Kevin's correct, we're actually TNEW & RAMP users, and Tessitura Network has been great partners in helping us monitor, so I'm not concerned about the database server at all. It's really our front end website that is giving us trouble. The site is not integrated with Tessitura in any way, it just points to our TNEW site (which has a waiting room in front of it to help manage the traffic coming into TNEW).
I spoke with our web developer yesterday who indicated that part of the issues we've been experiencing are due to the site being WordPress. (Note: he didn't help us design or create this site - he's just helping host it. He did create one of our other sites, which did not crash, even though it too had a huge spike in web traffic during these onsales.) He said that WordPress is more difficult to scale up.
I did find out that he's using Linode.com as the host provider, and had everything load balanced on 3 web servers that can hold 1000 users per second per server. He said that part of the reason the site crashed was that our graphics dept. who handles the content on this particular site, had hardcoded a large number of images to the dev server. When these changes got pushed live, users were hitting the site and being sent to the dev server rather than the live servers. The other issue he mentioned was a configuration issue with WordPress.
Does anyone have experience using WordPress for large volume sites?