Need to scale up the server capacity due to overload but to how much?

  • Resolved Steven

    (@stgoos)


    4 years, 3 months ago

    Hi all,

    Last night our WooCommerce site got overloaded again… :'(

    So since this was the 2nd time this month I’m seeking for some advice on how to -hopefully- prevent it from happening again in the future.

    The background
    We are bunch of whisky enthusiasts who buy casks and split them into cask shares (all non-profit basis, just against cost price to keep it affordable for everyone). This concept has grown in popularity over the past 8 years and currently there are about 800 people who regularly buy a cask share.

    Typically there are about 40 to 80 shares per cask available so with about 800 people interested in the more popular whisky brands it’s quite a rampage when the cask gets published on Wednesday at 19:00 CET… the server can’t handle the load with the populair brands and is then fully overloaded…

    Current hosting package and server config
    We are currently using the Enthusiast hosting plan of One.com which comes with 2 GB memory and 2x CPU priority (whatever that means in terms of actual CPU capacity I don’t know, I’ve already raised the question with One.com).

    In the wp-config.php we’ve already configured: define('WP_MEMORY_LIMIT', '1500M'); but I’m not 100% sure if WordPress / WooCommerce actually uses up to that amount of memory in reality. I already opened the support request with One.com to look into this as I don’t have access to the memory / cpu statistics from the One.com Dashboard.

    The question
    Does anyone has any idea / pointers how much server capacity would be needed to handle this kind of peak load?

    Are there other things I can look into to improve the performance of WooCommerce?

    Btw – I’d already disabled most plugins and sections of the website which are not relevant to the WooCommerce environment prior to tonight’s release of the new cask. So everything was already running in a more or less ‘naked’ setup.

    Oh – I already read https://docs.woocommerce.com/document/woocommerce-scaling-faqs/# but that is not getting me into the direction I need.

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)
  • Luminus Alabi

    (@luminus)

    Automattic Happiness Engineer

    Hi @stgoos,

    If your site is maxing out your hosts capacity, it’s probably time to either upgrade to a better losing solution on the same host or more than likely you need to switch hosts completely.

    You can take a look at the hosting solutions we recommend here – https://www.woocommerce.com/hosting-solutions/.

    Bear in mind that these are, by no means, the only hosts you should ever use but there’s some suggestion in there for pretty much every type of customer regardless of how much they’re looking to commit to financially for what they need.

    Thread Starter Steven

    (@stgoos)

    Hi Luminus,

    Thanks for your input. Yes – it’s indeed something I’m looking into, but is their a way to somehow calculate the requirements?

    Eg. for a fully clean install of WordPress + WooCommerce, how much memory is needed per user? And how much CPU power is needed per x amount of users?

    Of course, all very rough ball point calculations as every server is configured differently and there will always be some plugins in use.

    Luminus Alabi

    (@luminus)

    Automattic Happiness Engineer

    @stgoos,

    There’s no such calculation metric that I’m aware of as site performance is not measured by the number of users.

    You may want to discuss with a hosting provider to see how they benchmark such things.

    Thread Starter Steven

    (@stgoos)

    Thanks for the feedback @luminus.

    I already checked with One.com but they keep it very much in the dark. They also still haven’t provided me the server utilization data for the 60 minutes I’ve asked them and which they agreed to provide. So I do now expect One.com have over-provisioned the host server a bit too much and I feel they don’t have actual memory reservations for their hosting packages…
    I already started to discuss this with the others to see if they are okay with moving over to another host of which I now it works with actual memory reservations and no over-provisioning of the host servers.

    Plugin Support Damianne P (a11n)

    (@drwpcom)

    Hi @stgoos. I hope that you are able to sort this out soon! If you have any other questions, please start a new forum post.

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)
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