New load balancers handle the traffic spike

No sooner had we finished our extensive testing and switched our new load balancer pair live than one of our customers experienced a massive increase in traffic.

This customer has a cluster of virtual servers delivering a WordPress based web site. Normally this site does 10-20Mb/s of traffic but suddenly they were doing 400Mb/s. Our operational monitoring system was warning us that traffic patterns were different from normal but the site was still being delivered just fine. Traffic started to decline and then suddenly half an hour later the site was delivering 705Mb/s! That’s *forty* times the normal amount of traffic. Still the site remained working properly and was completely responsive when we ran some manual tests.

It turns out their content had been linked from a number of prominent sites and they were getting far more visitors than normal, a day later and traffic levels were back down to just above normal levels.

Coreware prides itself on providing well engineered solutions and we go to great lengths to make sure our infrastructure is both highly available and has enough spare capacity to meet unexpected demand.