Question

I’m new to production level web development, so sorry if this is obvious. My site has a potential to have a sudden surge of (permanent) users and I’m wondering what happens if too many users sign up in a short period of time, causing the site to run slowly. Since development takes time, would it just be a case of adding more boxes to the server, or does the site have to be taken down for code improvement?
Thanks

Answer 1

Don’t worry even very popular sites go through this. Coding well is always a plus, but sometimes even that is not enough. Twitter being an ideal example, they started their messaging on Ruby but had to move to Scala as they became more and more popular.

Since you say you are new, can I suggest getting yourself familiar with caching queries and caching static content? Learning about good indexing practices on SQL server should also be helpful in dealing with a large influx of users.