I had a link to my blog posted on Reddit yesterday and MySQL crashed on my EC2 Micro instance. I know I didn't have that many visitors because I used a marketing link that tracks hits. The link got 167 hits over the course of the last 18 hours, and MySQL crashed twice.

So anyway, 167 visits is not a lot, so I've done some short term optimizations like restricting the number of Apache threads to limit the MySQL calls. I also set up WP Super Cache to serve static content. Soon I'm going to offload all of my images to S3 or CloudFront. So this leads me to my question.

If this doesn't seem to help, and if i have another traffic "spike", how do AMIs work when you have a MySQL database? I think I understand that if you have more than one instance and assign the same Elastic IP to both of them, the incoming traffic gets distributed among both. But what happens when the MySQL database gets updated on one of the instances?

I just need to wrap my mind around what happens when I create an AMI and then launch a new instance to help with traffic.

Thanks for your suggestions.