If a website encounters an influx of unexpected traffic for multiple weeks causing it to crash, how do they fix this and how long would it normally take? Also, how could it still not function during lower traffic times?
In: Technology
When you open a website (let’s say Reddit), your computer sends a message to the computer running the website (called a server) saying “hey, can you tell me what’s on the homepage of reddit.com?” and the server sends back a message saying what’s on the homepage of reddit.com.
If too many people do it at once, the server can get too busy trying to answer all the messages. Like that scene in Harry Potter where they get thousands of Hogwarts letters.
If you’re lucky then it will answer as many messages as it can and ignore the rest, but that means the site still doesn’t load for most people. If you’re unlucky it won’t answer any of them. That depends on a bunch of details like how many messages it tries to answer at the same time. Either way though, most people don’t get an answer.
They can fix it by upgrading their server or getting more servers. Maybe they can try tweaking some settings to make the server answer the messages more quickly.
Usually it doesn’t stay down after the traffic spike. Some reasons that it might:
* Maybe the “low traffic” Is still much higher than it used to be
* Maybe they took the server offline so they could do upgrades
* Maybe they rent their server from another company, and they only pay for a certain number of messages per month, and the traffic spike used them all up, so now the server company won’t allow anyone to see the site until the month ends or they pay more.
* Maybe the server program crashed, so now the server computer is just sitting there not doing anything and ignoring your messages because the program isn’t running, until the owner logs in and starts the program again. (Servers are normal computers, they don’t do things except by running programs)
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