Dealing with Traffic Spikes with ai-Cache

Drupal Deals With Traffic Spikes

Given the viral nature of the web, small-scale visitor-swarms can quickly become enormous and overwhelming. It's kind of like the the videos you see during Shark Week on Discovery Channel – a little Facebook and Twitter chum in the water and presto: feeding frenzy! You want to be the guy in the steel cage when that happens.

This frenzy phenomenon occurs in a wide range of industries. Media sites were taxed immediately after the Haiti earthquake; sports sites recorded high traffic when Tiger Woods made a public apology; Woot.com always feels the pressure during a Woot-off (if you don't know what this is, I'm not at liberty to discuss it); public service sites are tested after heavy weather and other natural disasters.

Cloud computing offers elasticity to deal with these events, and more and more Drupal sites are being deployed there. ChapterThree has released an open Amazon Machine Instance (AMI) called Mercury that is optimized for Drupal deployment in the cloud. Mercury provides a solid baseline for a scalable Drupal site.

Another tool that can be added to the standard Drupal stack in the cloud is ai-Cache. ai-Cache can deliver over 250,000 HTTP requests per second, so it's kind of like a steel cage wrapped in a lead box. ai-Cache conducted performance tests with Drupal and increased the number of responses by 620 times per second!

In a Drupal deployment, ai-Cache takes heat off the web server, and enables high performance, by: 1) managing user connections and 2) serving cached html whenever possible. In concert with our partnership with ai-Cache, and for a recent government project, we developed a couple Drupal modules that automate the communication between Drupal and the caching software.

The modules can notify ai-Cache what to cache and when to refresh individual items (sometimes not entire pages, just parts of a page), which makes #2 above a more seamless integration point.

Bill's going to be discussing these modules in more depth here soon, but we wanted to get the word out on this partnership, because we're discovering that ai-Cache is a good thing to have when swimming in web 2.0 waters.