Posted by Chung Leong on 09/28/05 03:16

windandwaves wrote:
> b. what is a lot?

No easy answer. Depends a lot on the hardware and bandwidth, as well as
the nature of the site. Some years ago I was on a team building the
launch site for a certain next-generation video game console. The
requirements called for 20 million hits on the first day IIRC.

> c. are there any techniques to reduce the load on the server (e.g. changing
> PHP files into HTML ones)?

Zend sells a number products that are supposed to improve performance.
Code execution speed usually isn't a big factor though. Scalability is
usually limited by the database. So I would avoid hitting the database
as much as possible. For example, if you have a drop-down list of US
states, don't populate it with data from the database. It's quite
unnecessary as the list isn't going to change anytime soon.

> d. is there a way to measure server load and calculate expected load with X
> number of visitors?

For quotable numbers, you really need a commercial tool. LoadRunner
from Mercury Interactive and SilkTest from Segue come to mind.

For a very rough estimate, in the past I've done something as simple as
sticking <script> location.reload() </script> into my page footer and
opening up a bunch of browser windows.

[Back to original message]