Handling Traffic Spike when it Exceeds your Wildest Projections

Zyxware Powers ‘The News Minute’ Portal

On 23rd May 2019, all eyes were looking for the latest news reports about Election results made most of the websites faced heavy traffic. One of our client's website The News Minute was actively publishing the updated news reports on their website and the TNM_News minute server was continuously having a higher load on the election result date. The load spike on the server occurred due to higher organic website traffic.

The surge resulted in 46,64,279 hits and 15,94,520 visitors.

The total bandwidth usage of the website on the election day was calculated as 230.15 GiB. We as a team were able to provide consistent support to our clients to provide a better user experience for the visitors during the election results.

We were able to achieve this with the help of Drupal and the Digital Ocean cloud hosting platform. The website had internal page caching enabled and also the nginx caching set up which reduces the server resource usage and provides better performance. Also, continuous server resource monitoring and analyzing the live running processes also added to the result.