Reducing Heavy Usage – Addressing the 500 Server Error.

You may have encountered the dreaded “internal server error” message over the last few weeks when trying to view our site.
What you’d see is a blank page with an error message claiming that the server could not complete your request.
Well, after much troubleshooting it seems that the error is caused when too many people try to view the site at once.
To give you a better idea of what i’m talking about, i’ve included some stats..

that is 1 day.

growth has been phenominal over the last 3 months with indyish.com seeing:

• 91% growth in April
• 44% growth in May

and we’re looking at an estimated:

• 80-90% growth for the current month of June.

i’ve been monitoring the strain this was causing on our site, but when things got really bad i contacted our hosting provider to see if they had any suggestions.

Here’s an excerpt from the conversation i had with them:

[ me ]
> – now i’m thinking we are getting too much traffic. looks like we’re
> averaging 15,000+ pageviews per day all of a sudden. yipee! but we’re busting
> at the seams here.

[ them ]
You’re indeed getting too much traffic which is causing your user’s
processes to continually get killed off by our process watcher for
bypassing the memory restrictions we have in effect. We have these
precautions in place to prevent users from crashing the web server and
adversely affecting other users.

So, yeah, it looks like i’ll be scrambling to optimize the site and try to conserve resources for the next little while.
Hopefully, this will help free up the server for all the new visitors we’ve been getting.

If you do get this error message (instead of the page you were expecting) just try load the page again and it should work this time. If that still doesn’t work (it usually does) – then please try back in about 15 minutes. The busiest hours for this site are between 8-10am and 5-7pm – keep this in mind if for some reason the error persists.

Thanks again, everyone, for your unwavering support and ongoing patience thoughout this process.