When we moved our infrastructure over to Amazon’s EC2 a few weeks ago we also switched all of our web servers over to EC2, including the one you’re reading this on now. The switch was fairly painless once I got past some RSA key issues and the server has been holding up well. How well? If we got front page on IGN.com would we be able to survive? Once when I was at gamerDNA we got hit by Kotaku and were “Kotaku-Killed” for a few hours while our databases recovered. That day we learned that writing our own queries instead of relying on ActiveRecord (the ORM in Rails) was a good thing.
Thankfully our website is much simpler than the hundreds of thousands of lines that encompass gamerDNA. The main page is just XHTML/CSS with PHP gluing together a few things and doing some templating for us. Everything is running on Apache. The blog runs Wordpress and the forums run vBulletin on a mySQL database. Nothing too fancy yet with advanced php caching or layering up Apache with ngnix.
Today I thought we should do some minor load testing just to make sure it held up ok. In the end I did testing using a handful of websites, Apache’s AB tool and looking at the logs by hand. But something really cool for you to see is the visualization that was rendered using gltail, a ruby program which visualizes various types of logs (apache, postgresql, rails, etc).
I basically launched the program, threw a ’stress test’ site at the server and let it run while screen grabbing it. Turned out pretty cool. The web server held up perfectly and I was able to easy access it on another computer at the same time. Yet my Macbook Pro didn’t hold up as well to the visualization side of things and it got choppy when things got really nuts. I tried to do the same video when testing it with AB, but it was too much for the visualizer and nearly crashed my poor laptop. Anyway, here’s the video. Be sure to check it out in HD.
