How does a website crash from too much traffic?
In: Technology
Imagine a restaurant with typical traffic on a random afternoon. The one waiter/waitress are keeping up just fine with the 2 or 3 tables that are in at any given time. Everyones food comes out in a reasonable time and they’re all happy.
Now imagine that a tour bus gets off at the restaurant and suddenly 40 tables need to be seated. The waiter/waitress will take orders one at a time and deliver them to the kitchen, but it still takes a long time for that last table to put in their order. The kitchen also backs up, because even if the waitress can put in an order every minute, they can only handle one every 3 minutes, so they start building a queue.
The same kind of thing happens on a web server with a sudden influx of traffic. Even if it’s just handling requests and responding with static files, that is still work being done, and simple work still adds up. It gets even harder when the server is a full web application, where it needs to make database calls.
When you visit a website, your computer is “calling” another computer called a server that has the website information You asked for. If the server gets too many calls at once it can run out of resources and have trouble answering all the calls or finding the right information.
A website runs on a computer. When people visit the website, that computer needs to do things for them. Send them the right pages. Maybe make some calculations or save/load some data. If too many people show up and ask things from that computer, it crashes, just like your personal computer would.
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