howard stern traffic question
 

I'm wondering how one sets up server for howard stern traffic.

How can servers be setup for millions of simultaneous users?

As far as mysql databases go, how can one database be used across multiple servers?

My guess is, you would need multiple servers and lots of bandwith to handle this. What seems difficult is how to calculate how many servers would be needed and how much bandwidth. Also, getting one site to work accross multiple servers seems tricky too.

load balancing

Why do you care?

if one needs to ask on gfy, one should just hire a hosting company that's good at this. :) i don't want to spam recommendations, i'm sure others will do that, but you basically want a company that's been through this a few times in the past, so they know what to prepare for, and give them as much notice as you can about the airtime, so they can prepare and be ready for whatever might go wrong.

Well, a managed webhosting company might to something like this, but I'm looking at something less expensive using unmanaged servers.

good luck. if you have something that will pull THAT much traffic, spend the dime on a good solution :2 cents:

BIG MISTAKE especially cause you dont sound like a sys admin

why do you have likewhoa in your sig btw?

man would it suck to get the plug then have your site be super slow or unreachable

Sigh...

I'll tell you from personal experience doing a website for the Opie and Anthony show, you're not going to find an inexpensive way to do one for Stern.

The traffic will hit once. The site will crash. The next day, you're paying for a hosting company that has a significant amount of bandwidth at their disposal and utilizes load balancing.

There used to be a link to one of my sites from
http://www.howardstern.com/
(when it actually had something) back in the late 90s. I got alot of traffic, but one dedicated server was able to handle it. That also included advertising on The Hun at the same time. Not sure how a spot from the radio show would go.

i used to host the marksfriggin.com site (temporarily for a couple of weeks anyhow) and that had huge loads on it. and that is just a stern news type site and that brought down one of our servers several times

Few servers setup properly, piece of cake. Get yourself a sysadmin. :2 cents:

oooooooooo load balancing makes me hard

To get connect to mysql from mulitple servers, you just need to setup the host table and a user in the user table to accept a user from a different host. My concern would be if mysql as the best choice for a ton of connections.

Your not going to get millions of connections at once. Maybe over the period of one day. I have had 500,000 unique visitors in one day on one dedicated server with no problems.

If your running a alot of programs that are going to hog resources when visitors visit your site, then you might want to look into load balancing. If it's mainly going to be static webpage with mysql and some programs being used now and then. Then just one dedicated server should do it for you. Just setup the OS, webserver, mysql and what ever else as optimised as possiable.

So, you're saying instead of setting user to localhost in mysql, you would set it to IP or nameserver name of server?

"Your not going to get millions of connections at once. Maybe over the period of one day. I have had 500,000 unique visitors in one day on one dedicated server with no problems."

Actually, I think it is very possbile to get 500K to 1million simultaneous users within a few minutes. That is why I meantioned howard stern. If he gives out name of site, people near computers go to that site right away. They probably aren't going to wait till end of day.

As you meantioned, 500K users a day might not be a problem if it is spread throughout day. All at once, though and CPU will prob get maxed out regardless of amount of bandwidth.

I've played around with Round Robin for dns in past. Someone meantioned that as option, but that seems not as good to me as load balancer server. Problem with load balancer seems that it is going to be hit hard with all the traffic and have to forward it to servers. It seems like it might be hard for load balancer to stay up under all of this traffic.

Are there any companies that specialize in just handling traffic for a week or less?

Well, what do all the links in my signature have in common? That is the answer.

You have the East coast live show first...then re-airing on the West...plus whenever they replay it on the E! channel. AS WebTitan mentioned "MarksFriggin.com" is where most of the traffic from the show will come from throughout the week. I've had experience with the shows traffic twice.....if you have any questions hit me up. icq: 174843129

You rarely need mysql replication (running more than one mysql server running the same database information) and you rarely need more than one server to handle traffic. If you expect an extreme amount of traffic 3 servers is max what you will usually need. 1.0 million uniques, each hit running cgi + graphics + sql we have setup on 3 servers, 1 for cgi/www, 1 for gfx, 1 for sql.

You can probably get by with one suitably powerful machine that is properly tuned, or maybe two, one for sql, one for web. Hit me up on icq 36837470 if you want some help tuning, I can also give you a few quotes on our services, I think we will come very close to what you are paying for unmanaged services, except you wont have the headache of trying to set this up yourself.