The perfect setup

[Seahawks.NET]

Hey all. We're new to the IPS community as we will be moving our forums over to IP.Board in the coming months. I'm here looking for advice on the perfect setup for our growing community. What sort of analytics would you all like to see in order to help me build the 2013 version of our community from the ground up?

Here are some simple monthly views from Google Analytics

Being that we are a sports forum, we have 3 different traffic loads;

• Weekly, during the season we'll see high traffic on game day, tapering off throughout the week until the next gameday
• Playoffs will be the same traffic pattern as the in-season weekly traffic, but 2-3x larger numbers
• Off season where things will plug along pretty consistently until something major happens (a trade, release, firing,etc) and all hell will break loose in a very short window of time with thousands of connections coming in simultaneously.

December would fall into the typical weekly, in-season traffic pattern. Somewhere around 35k-40k on gameday, tapering off to 15k-20k throughout the week.

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January brought 2 playoff games. Traffic pattern shows an average of 35k or so per day with peaks on gameday around 70k, and then tapering off after the loss to Atlanta, settling into the off season.

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February shows the typical off season. Somewhere between around 15k per day.

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March shows the opening of free agency, with a spike in traffic over a few day period. Handling this traffic has gone pretty well other than the moment the news breaks. Both the 11th and 13th had breaking news that brought our current environment to its knees. I've seen the environment handle larger sustained loads in the past, so it seems like something was getting stuck in a wait state, causing huge backups in processes. Once we restarted the environment, the load was easily handled.

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The previous environment isn't important, as we will build the environment for IP.Board from scratch, but for reference, the current environment is PHPBB3 running on an Amazon EC2 medium instance, with the database running on an Amazon RDS small instance that is rolled to a large instance when a large amount of mySQL connections are needed. PHPBB3 code is running on nginx/fpm/apc.

[Seahawks.NET]

Not one reply, suggestion, link to further reading?

[Aiwa]

Are you looking for hardware recommendations or software?

There are loads of recommendations in this forum... Just search around a bit...

There are multiple recommendations for nginx over apache... nginx is more resource friendly... I've not made the switch yet, but it's on my list of things to do.