One of the member sites of The Buzz Media ran a story this morning that caused the load on the host server to go pas ‘11′… waaaay way past ‘11′ – to 257.89 to be exact according to ‘top’ (above).
This host server was not in a load-balanced configuration when the rush happened, we weren’t able to simply add more WWW servers into the rotation to lessen the load, we just had to sit there and see our site die.
The Buzz Media has recently moved member sites to Slicehost’s hosting services, with us liking it quite a bit so far.
One of the most compelling reasons we went with Slicehost was the real-time, non-destructive ‘resize’ functionality that Slicehost provides administrators:
Fortunately when the shit hit the proverbial fan we were able to get out from under crushing server load by calling a ‘resize’ on that particular server and ramping it up temporarily for 8 hours until the server load fell back to normal amounts.
At that point we ‘resized’ it again back down to it’s original slice-size and all we were charged was a pro-rated amount for the slice differential for the amount of time that it was used.
Brilliant actually… much easier than EC2 and gave us much-faster relief with almost no knuckle-busting work from our end without setting up a load-balanced farm for that particular site.
