Abstract
Public websites for government agencies have unique traffic patterns. Site traffic usually varies in a remarkably predictable wave: two peaks per day, weekdays higher than weekends, and some seasonal variation. Then, interrupting this consistency, some sort of crisis or marketing event can spike traffic up to hundreds of times the normal volume, resulting in low availability or complete inaccessibility of the site. Plus Three will present a use case of a site whose traffic spiked upward to over one hundred times normal volume following a press event. A combination of disk and memory caches built with XML::Comma, HTML::Mason,  Apache  RedHat Content Accelerator , and the allowed our development team to perform a rapid shift of our client's four machine cluster to deliver the high-priority content primarily out of RAM while experiencing only a minimal slowdown on dynamic content. Site traffic peaked at over 60 gigabits per second, while the site's response time remained below one second, measured from three separate monitoring locations. Our President and VP of Technology will deliver a joint presentation, focusing both on the technology and the preparation required to deal with crisis traffic on a government website. |