So you wrote a blog post about something that seemed fairly innocuous, but for whatever reason, it caught the attention of one of the major sites and now your server load is at 110 and climbing, the ssh command line session is taking thirty seconds to respond to anything at all, and given that your post is on the front page of slashdot at primetime, this doesn’t look like it’s a temporary blip. What do you do?
Okay, first things first. You don’t have time to do a proper fine-tuning session. You need a quick & dirty tuneup here. Proper fine tuning you leave till after the traffic spike, and you can then come back at it with a plan and decent tools like siege and so on – but this is the “fix it in three minutes” version. So if you see stuff here that looks crude to you, despair not, everything looks crude when you’re trying to do it in that kind of timeframe.
