Dealing with high traffic

middleman666

Hey All,

Say I wanted to build a website that could take a hit of 50 thousand people all trying to view it at the same time, what would I need?

If I got a load of servers on my side, how could I make the traffic balance out between them and all contact a central database?

Would something like this help?
http://aws.amazon.com/vpc/

Cheers

bpat1434

Well, say you purchase 10 dedicated servers. What you would want to do is set it up something like this:

                           --------------
                          /              \
                          | The Internet |
                          \              /
                           -------------
                                 |
                                 |
                                 V
                            +----------+
                            | Firewall |
                            +----------+
                                 |
                                 |
                                 V
                         +---------------+
                         | Load Balancer |
                         +---------------+
+--------------+           /  /  |  \  \           +--------------+
| Web Server 1 |          /  /   |   \  \          | Web Server 5 |
+--------------+         /  /    |    \  \         +--------------+
   |            \_______/  /     |     \  \_______/          |
   |                      /      |      \                    |
   |                     /       |       \                   |
   |     +--------------+        |        +--------------+   |
   |     | Web Server 2 |        |        | Web Server 4 |   |
   |     +--------------+        V        +--------------+   |
   |        |            +--------------+      |         ____/
   |        |        +---| Web Server 3 |      |        /
   |        |        |   +--------------+     /        /
   |        |        |                       /        /
   |        |        |                      /        /
   |        |        |          ___________/        /
   \        |        |         /           ________/
    \    ___V________/ _______/           /
     +->/            \/                  /
        |  DB Server |<-----------------
        \____________/

That's the dedicated way to do it. THe load balancer would evenly distribute the network load among the servers for you. You could also add a NAS and use that to house your web document root and then you don't have to worry about synching data between more than one place.

A cloud most likely would work; however, I'm not sure I'd use Amazon. I might spend the big-bucks and take a look at The GridLayer by LayeredTech and see what their prices are. Then I can easily do whatever I want within a set of servers.