Any tips on handling short term heavy traffic?

[GeorgeofCS]

I'm a little worried about my site after next week. The site is powered by vb and next week my site will be featured in a couple very big media outlets. Smart Money Magazine being one of them. So I'm looking at my traffic going from 2000 people a day to over 25,000 - 50,000 a day for only about a few weeks. Personally I don't know if my server can handle that heavy of a traffic level. We handled 15,000 fine with some minor down times a year ago. The big thing is that this will be gone just as fast as it comes. So any tips on what I can do to help the site continue to run if problem begin to occur. Like any big little known resource hogs that I can turn off etc. I'm hoping other vb boards have dealt with this situation before.

[Xenon]

you can temporarly disable pm system on your board, disable also some of the statisticqueries on forumhome for this time, this would surely help you.

also installing the beta hacks for saving thread-view in an extra table will help you

if you have time enough, create a style without images, so you won't have to much bandwithabuse because of images

this are things which came to my mind

[Sparkz]

or, if you want to keep images, you could host them on a different server if you have that option.

If you haven't done this already, I would enable gzip compression too if I were you. That's also a huge bandwith saver.

Disabling searches could save you some resource usage.

You could also try to disable avatars too. Custom avatars are saved in the DB, so that would also reduce resource usage somewhat.

[Xenon]

also the who's online on forumhome should be disabled for viewing (at least for the normal ones )

and any hacks which are just here for visual effects but not really needed (online today....)

[GeorgeofCS]

Bandwidth isn't too much of a problem I'm heavily under using that. But as far as stats and all. Just pulling them off the forumhome template will that kill them from being accessed or would you have to pull them from the index.php script as well. I'm curious on how that little bit goes. If killing them from the templates does it then I'm all set . I actually though about with the main page just converting to a html page for the time being. I actually have the custom avatars as files hack installed so I'm hoping it should be too bad. The good thing is my members are very willing to lose some of these feature temporarily.

[Sparkz]

You'll have to yank them out of the php-files.
But keep in mind that every byte the webserver has to send uses some tiny amount of bandwith.

[Xenon]

yes, but it's enough to comment it out
no need to completly deinstall it *gg*

most of the time it's even enough to just outcomment the queries.

replacing index.php with an index.html is a good idea for that time, if you can achieve enough functionality through that.

[Sparkz]

Well, commenting them out is in effect the same as removing them

[Xenon]

really? :P

but it's easier to restor em so

[Sparkz]

OMG! Xenon, you are turning this in to a spam thread... Please ban yourself now, thank you