It has come to my attention, when a client of mine recently experienced unexpected traffic spike, that some industry standard solutions not always work or should i say not 100% reliable all the time. My client’s server setup was an-old-school Apache 2.2/mod_php WordPress blog installation. One day they posted some “hot-buzz” celebrity photos and server had become non-responsive under the traffic flow. Of course, at that time i was unaware about high-availability setups and never imagined scenarios like this one, when you get monthly volume of visitors during the 24 hour period.
Since then i have researched a lot of places online and found, that Apache web server is not the only solution to the hosting setup problem. Many others exist and those others, event quite “beta”, allow for the great tolerance for the high volume traffic.
Today i’d like to share with you my test results for my current server setup – LEMP or Linux, nginx (Engine-x), MySQL, PHP-FPM versus my old setup for this blog: LAMP – Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP. Both of those are on the Linode VPS (Linode 360). Before getting rid of the old server configuration i booted it one more time and ran tests using guys from LoadImpact to determine how will each of these survive under the load of 10-20-30-40-50 simulations requests.