WiredTree VPS 384 under load
One of the first question I had prior to moving to WiredTree’s VPS 384 plan was how much traffic would it be able to handle. An answer came on June 14th when someone submitted a page from a website I have on this VPS to reddit where it stood on the first page for almost an entire day.
So what did that mean?
- Traffic. On July 15th Awstats reported a traffic of 23 GB and about 3.5 million hits on lolhome.com. Google Analytics counted about 125.000 unique visitors that day.
- Load. On an ordinary day the VPS was having an average memory usage of 55% out of the 384 MB available. Apache was also dealing with 3 requests/second on average. When the visitors from reddit came, the memory peaked at 85-95%. This caused Apache to reset a couple of times and reported roughly 130 requests/second.
- Revenue. The website is monetized by AdSense. I won’t give away the exact figures but they increased about 9 times that day.
Screenshots
unique visitors
1st spot on reddit homepage
VPS performance
I must say I’m quite satisfied with the way my VPS handled the short burst of visitors. On a shared environment the website would almost certainly have been put down by the host. I monitored the website intensively that day and there were absolutely no slow server responses on any website on the machine. Apache restarts only took a few seconds (2-3) so downtime was not a problem.
Although the websites appeared to be working fine the VPS was reaching its limits. If I were to have that amount of traffic on a regular basis I would probably upgrade. Until then I can rest knowing that my sites are able to stay online should a traffic spike kick in.
