High-Traffic Architecture for 135 Million Users
The Challenge
A leading online newspaper serving 135 million users was crumbling under its own success. During peak hours, the website would slow down or display error messages, severely impacting user experience and ad revenue. The constraint? We had to fix this without upgrading existing hardware resources, as the client had a strict infrastructure budget.
Our Strategic Approach
Skynats analyzed the stack and found it bloat-heavy: cPanel, Apache mod_php, and unoptimized WordPress plugins were consuming resources unnecessarily. We devised a "Less is More" strategy:
- Lean Software Stack: Replacing heavy cPanel and Apache with a lightweight, performance-tuned custom stack.
- Efficient Processing: Switching to Nginx and PHP-FPM to handle concurrent connections more efficiently.
- Aggressive Caching: Implementing multi-layer caching to serve content without hitting the backend.
- Database Tuning: Optimizing MySQL indexes to reduce query latency under load.
Technical Implementation Details
We completely overhauled the software layer while keeping the hardware identical:
- Control Panel Removal: Uninstalled cPanel to free up significant system resources (RAM/CPU) previously used for management overhead.
- Web Server Swap: Replaced Apache with Nginx, tuned for high concurrency and low memory footprint.
- PHP Optimization: Configured PHP-FPM (FastCGI Process Manager) to handle thousands of requests simultaneously.
- Advanced Caching: Deployed Varnish for HTTP acceleration and Redis for object caching to instantly serve repeated data.
- Kernel Tuning: Tweaked Linux kernel parameters (file descriptors, TCP backlog) to maximize network throughput.
The Outcome
The transformation was completed in 15 days. Post-optimization, the exact same server hardware now effortlessly handles peak traffic that previously crashed it. We successfully achieved the client's goal of serving millions of users with zero additional infrastructure investment, proving that smart engineering beats throwing money at hardware.