How much web traffic can I handle? What is needed?

[penders]

With talk of performance and recent interview with Stephen Fry in this months .NET mag I'm wondering how much traffic I can in fact handle on an Ariotek shared server...?

S.Fry talking about Twitter...

"When I tweet a link it usually gets around two or three thousand requests a second. Especially if I word it in a way where I really want people to go to a site."

Err, wow. (Dang, just wondering how much he could charge an SEO company for tweeting a site they are trying to promote?!)

Consequently, if he's planning to tweet about your site, you'll receive a 'SEVERE' warning message from his people. "Fifty percent of the time the site is down in seconds - even when we've contacted the site owners and they've told us everything will be fine."

Oooo. Not that I'm likely to get twittered/tweeted (whatever) by the Fry, but...

Q. What kind of set up is reqd in order to receive such traffic without going down? I realise this is a bit of an open ended question, as it will also depend how complex your site is. But what if we assume a page size of say 100KB, static HTML, no DB. ...?

Q. And what would a comfortable max limit be on a shared server?

Any ideas?!

[Colin]

We have shared servers which have over 4000 requests every second for Apache processes and handle it well however the same spec'ed server with only 100 visitors can go load crazy depending on what script is being queried.

[jabb0]

You can get tools that will hammer your site to hell and back and produce some nice tables and graphs.

Web Test Tools looks like a fun place to start
I have never got round to actually trying any yet, but its defo on the horizon.

I am thinking doing this to a production server might get you in trouble :eek:
Especially if ur on the same one as me :p

[Malcolm]

A big advantage of a shared server must be having a powerful server at a low price. Most of the sites on a shared server will have very little traffic so if a site gets digg'ed or slash dotted it can cope.

I understand that WordPress requires a lot of processing power to serve pages and if a post is very popular a caching plugin reduces server load, by serving an html copy of that page.

[penders]

Thanks for your responses and the list of web test tools. I was trying to stress test a website a couple of years ago and was looking round for free tools - as the developer I was concerned about load, but the company didn't seem too bothered (so it had to be a freebie)?! However, I didn't manage to get any tools set up to work successfully at the time and instead cobbled together my own, rather crude, 'load test'!

[Malcolm]

There are too many variables on a shared server. To test a web site I think it needs to be the only site on a server or server cluster.