[racket-dev] can racket-lang.org survive a slashdotting?

From: Anton van Straaten (anton at appsolutions.com)
Date: Sun Aug 1 19:46:05 EDT 2010

Neil Van Dyke wrote:
> Can the racket-lang.org Web server(s) handle a huge spike in traffic, 
> such as if it got on the front page of reddit.com?
> 
> schemecookbook.org somehow got onto the front page of reddit.com 
> briefly, which seems to have killed schemecookbook.org.  This is no big 
> loss, since I think schemecookbook.org gives a bad impression even when 
> it's working.  However, I'd hate for racket-lang.org to get its
> potential 15 minutes of fame, but burn out before sifting a new batch of 
> users out of the gazillion casual browsers.

Scheme Cookbook runs on TWiki, which is a Perl-based wiki not known for 
its efficiency or performance.  Among other things, the index pages are 
dynamically generated by a real-time full-text regex search through the 
entire site's content, which isn't the most scaling-friendly approach 
imaginable.

In any case, the site has been up for a while now.  Making the Apache 
caching settings more aggressive took care of the problem.

Anton



Posted on the dev mailing list.