Most scalable way of serving a small set of static HTTP content
- by Ekevoo
The story: Hi guys. I'm among the people responsible for serving the results of the most anticipated (by number of people participating) annual entrance exam in my state. As such, when our results are published, the interest is overwhelming. In the past we delegated the responsibility of serving the results to the media, but that spoils a little the officialness of these results.
This year we went with a little (long overdue) experiment of using lighttpd instead of Apache as well as other physical network optimizations I wasn't directly involved with. The results were very satisfactory. The server didn't choke even once, nor we saw any of the usual Twitter complaints on unavailability and/or slowness that were previously common. However, because we still delegated the first publication of the results to the media I'm still not 100% sure we can handle the load of actually publishing the results first.
The question: Now because these files are like 14MB in total and a true lightweight Linux distribution isn't that big either, I'm thinking: what if next year we run full RAMdrive? Is there any? Is that useful? Is that worth it for a team that uses Debian almost exclusively?
Are there other optimizations that I should be focusing on instead?
