51–60 of 195 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a site where you can ask people to describe you, in three words.
I am not sure how long it is going to last. i mean you will run out of friends to write about, Isn't it?
Hi there, your home page is very simple, render it in plain HTML and post the signup to queue.php.
In queue.php put:
The cache table should just be a PK cache_id and a text field (or perhaps mediumtext). I've suggested using a database instead of a filesystem based cache because, if you're doing this quickly, doing it using MySQL means you're less likely to run into file permissions or security problems.
Then you're at least capturing everyone's information whilst you figure out how to scale.
Also, for the short term, Amazon EC2 would be the best option to handle the traffic.
The quick solution is to scale up your current linode package, however, I think you might find that your traffic is going to peak and will wane next week after everyone has gone back to school/work and is out of the holiday mindset at which point you can scale back.
Put in a throttle - /proc/loadavg
Limit it to X signups per hour, asking them to check back next hour. Collect email and notify when they can sign up. Point them at a facebook page, ask them to like the page, do announcements when the next 'batch' of users is able to sign up.
If you want some help analyzing the slow query logs and/or the normal logs, email me a url of a .gz/.bz2 of a reasonable snippet at hnusername@hnusername.com.
Since you're running nginx, consider doing an alias and use proxy caching. I would doubt your static files are causing too many issues, but, if you can cache computationally expensive pages a little, that can help.
I recently built a Facebook application that approached the same kind of growth. Sites like this typically see eCPM between $0.10 and $0.30 for advertising. So you're looking at around $30/day revenue right now. Consider switching to EC2. This will allow you to easily scale up to a more powerful server if growth continues or down to a less powerful one if traffic tapers off. Depending on how you set things up, a comm…
short term: heroku long term: app engine (just port it to webapp framework)
Why?
App engine after that b/c it should be fairly easy to port and it's an extremely headache-free way to host an app. Now that they have always on instances, it's very fast and scales efficiently and effortlessly.
I recently built a Facebook application that approached the same kind of growth. Sites like this typically see eCPM between $0.10 and $0.30 for advertising. So you're looking at around $30/day revenue right now. Consider switching to EC2. This will allow you to easily scale up to a more powerful server if growth continues or down to a less powerful one if traffic tapers off. Depending on how you set things up, a comm…
Would it be possible to see your Facebook app? I'm curious to see what traits these fast growing apps have in common in person.