Site Availability is for Everybody
summary
A production outage triggered by a 1.6 billion Euro crowdfunding spike forces a static front page and reveals the claim: simulated load finds real bottlenecks. Start with Apache Bench (ab) with -c and -n flags, e.g. 1 concurrency and 1000 requests, watch Little’s Law-driven latency rise, inspect ulimit and ephemeral port limits and Unicorn worker memory, and shift to multi-host tools like Bees with Machine Guns or Ruby JMeter; measure with slow query logs, New Relic/Skylight and rack-mini-profiler to confirm fixes.
AI-written summary · about
chapters (18)
- 0:00Start
- 0:48POP QUIZ
- 10:52Failed Requests
- 11:58Little's Law: L
- 13:282. Application Server
- 15:23Multiple Queues are Less Efficient
- 16:27Increasing Timeout Threshold
- 19:17TCP/IP Port Exhaustion
- 19:30Ephemeral Ports
- 19:44Decrease TIME WAIT
- 20:01Increase Port Range
- 20:49Cache Busting
- 21:59Blocking External Requests
- 23:28Zero Sum Game
- 24:26External database
- 26:10rack-mini-profiler
- 26:27Slow Query Log
- 26:43SHOW PROCESSLIST
related talks
30mAbove the Clouds: Investigating Systems from 32,000 ft.
39mFrom Stubbies to Longnecks
28mStress Testing in Production: The New York Times Engineering Survival Guide
44mPerformance Testing for Modern Apps
30mRails Performance monitoring: A primer for developers
26mLoad testing websites following the steps of a user journey
54mBottleneck Analysis
39mProfiling and Benchmarking 101