Is my server big enough?

[dransome]

Summary

It's common for a customer to wonder whether or not their server will handle a certain volume of traffic (visits/requests).

We should discuss:

• the factors that contribute to this (e.g. code quality/efficiency, the significance of simultaneous requests vs. spreading traffic over a long period of time, caches, database design/indexing etc., server configuration, server resources (especially RAM and CPU))
• how it can be measured definitively (load testing)
  • how to estimate, if load testing is not viable?
• strategies to increase capacity if the results are not high enough (CDN, caching, server upgrade, application refactoring/redesign, use an APM to identify and target the heaviest parts of the application, database slow query log)

It may be desirable to split some of those topics into separate articles and just link to them from this one?

The overall aim is to provide sufficient information for a customer to be able to answer this question, or at least have a decent starting point, for themselves rather than us needing to repeat the same groundwork for each enquiry of this nature.

References

No authoritative links were researched so far.

We already have most/all of this information in-house, so I recommend to use the combined knowledge of the team rather than researching existing articles on the topic.

It's also important to acknowledge that a majority of existing articles on this topic are likely to be "content marketing" pieces from providers with varying agendas (e.g. CDN providers will focus on reasons why you need to buy their CDN, and may misrepresent the power of that particular strategy).