Opmize for high traffic

Hi @levanmirvelashvili

I’m just posting the typical issues/resolutions to such cases. They are almost every time connected with two things - Website Optimization and Server/Droplet Optimization.

Let’s start with Server Optimization.

When looking at Server/Droplet Optimization, there are a few necessary services/packages that are universal.

• The first one would be Server-side caching. Server cache is an umbrella term covering a number of different types of caching. This includes Content Delivery Network (CDN) caching, object caching, and opcode caching. Depending on what you want to achieve you might need one or the other. Usually, though, you can have all 3 types of caching as it shouldn’t interfere with your Website/App. I won’t go into more details about what each caching does as this post will become 3 pages long. There are multiple documents providing services/packages for each of the server-type caching.

• Next would be using PHP-FPM (if your Website is using PHP of course). PHP-FPM is an efficient method on how to minimize the memory consumption and rise the performance for the Websites with heavy traffic. It is significantly faster than traditional CGI-based methods in multi-user PHP environments.

• Another solution would be Database Caching. A database cache supplements your primary database by removing unnecessary pressure on it, typically in the form of frequently accessed read data. The cache itself can live in a number of areas including your database, application or as a standalone layer. Usually, for this kind of caching is being used Redis.

• Apache NPM modules. If you are using Apache, you are using one of three NPM modules. Most certainly if you haven’t configured anything on it and have used the default configuration, you are using NPM_Prefrok which is the most outdated one and thus the slower. I’ll recommend using one of the other two - NPM_Worker and NPM_Event depending on your situation. Again, I would urge you to read more about these 3 and what is applied in which case.

• Apache Workers. Basically, the Apache workers are equivalent to a room full of seats. These seats are the projection to your website. When someone opens your website, it’s like one person going to this room and sitting on one of the chairs. When the limit is reached, in order for a person to load your website, another one needs to close it. So basically, I’ll suggest increasing that value as well.

Those were the basic optimizations on a server level, let’s start with your Website/App

If you are using a CMS like WordPress, Magento, Joomla, Opencart or anything of the same matter, there will be plugins/addons. These addons can be very powerful if used correctly. The most helpful plugins are:

• Caching Plugins
• Image Optimization Plugins
• Plugins that reduce redirections/requests
• Plugins that reduce the size of JS and CSS files.
• More often than not, there are a lot of JS and CSS files that are not being used, removing those should work as well

If you are not using a CMS, you’ll need to try and do what these plugins are doing manually.

Usually, Websites/Apps are slow because of a couple of reasons which range from too many requests or big images to a bunch of unnecessarily big JS or CSS files. Optimizing these whether you are using a Plugin or doing it manually is enough.

I hope this was helpful.

Regards, KFSys

Hi there @levanmirvelashvili,

There are different things that you could do to optimize your server:

• As the $5 Droplet has 1GB of RAM I could suggest starting with adding a SWAP file so that you could have some buffer. You can follow the steps on how to do here:

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-add-swap-space-on-ubuntu-20-04

• After that, if you are using Nginx as your web server, you could follow the steps on how to optimize it here:

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-optimize-nginx-configuration

• Then make sure that MySQL is also optimized by following the steps here:

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-optimize-mysql-with-query-cache-on-ubuntu-18-04

• Another thing that I could suggest is going through this tutorial on 5 ways to improve your setup:

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/5-ways-to-improve-your-production-web-application-server-setup

A few other things that I could suggest:

• Make sure to use a CDN to offload some of the load from your server
• Optimize your website, if you are using a CMS like WordPress, make sure to install a caching plugin

Hope that this helps. Regards, Bobby