Website Scale (Magento & WordPress)

As campaigns and returning customers drive up website traffic, scale becomes important. Difference between understanding performance and scale is important and an analogy will help. While better performance is like a faster car, scale is like a better highway. On the cloud, it is easier to add lanes and remove them.

While AWS and other cloud auto scaling is huge win and almost a necessity for some websites, cold start issues – time it takes for new resources to be ready and available – make it one of many strategies.

luroConnect offers many strategies to scale, depending on the exact situation. To start with, the architecture allows many strategies to be applied. At the heart there is a path based load balancer – our nginx load balancer that can direct traffic to app servers based on URL.

Strategies include

Warm servers – useful if a campaign is known to drive traffic. A smaller warm server is kept standby to take additional traffic. These are with knowledge of campaigns to ensure expenses are kept in control.

Time based servers – for websites with high daytime admin usage, additional server is turned on to take admin traffic during working hours. Off hours admin traffic is served from the main app servers. This strategy can be applied to other time based known traffic patterns.

Checkout servers if campaigns drive huge browsing traffic, one or more checkout servers will take traffic from customers who have started the checkout flow.

Other things that help improve scale

We like to ensure caches are warm. Periodically and especially during cache clear events, our Smart Cache Warmer ensures most likely pages are in cache reducing the chances of a real user getting a cache miss.

Our 0-downtime code deploy ensures code release while the website is live. (0-downtime can only be achieved if there are no database changes in Magento). Scheduled deploy can also be used to deploy code automatically on low traffic times.

Interested in talking to us about how your website can scale better? Schedule a time below and we can analyze your website for free.

We can analyze your site for free

Schedule a call

Not happy with your website performance and want an expert to look at it?

  • We will analyze your site using public information.
  • We will ask you to give us a 1 day web server log file.
  • We will try to identify what steps if any you should take to improve your sites performance goals.