| Eswaddle.com, often mentioned in past newsletters, had its products featured on the Dr. Phil tv program last week. It was rather astonishing to track the traffic spike directly after each airing of the show across the continental US time zones. As might be expected, their Cirrus server needed to grow. Because each step up in size doubles both the disk space and the cpu power, by the end of the day the site was working with 32 times the disk and 32 times the cpu it had started with. Size, however, is not everything. Tuning the Apache server to react appropriately was also an essential ingredient in keeping the site healthy and responsive through the traffic blitz. Once the traffic steadied at lower post-show levels, the site was able to resize again, this time to a smaller server. Apache server tuning appropriate to the newly selected size again finished the adjustment.
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