rationalwiki.org is getting hammered again. It looks like MySQL is the
busiest portion - seriously just doing a lot of work.
Our current arrangement is: one box for MySQL, Apache, Lucene (the
latter reindexing weekly); two Squids; a load balancer. These are all
virtual machines on Linode (who we like). Apache and Squid boxes are
Ubuntu 12.04 servers.
The *usual* thing when we get hammered is that Reddit discovers an
amusing tumbleweed article. The squids take care of this, of course.
But then something like the Bill Nye/Ken Ham debate happens, we score
pretty highly in Google for skeptical material and a wide variety of
articles gets hit and MySQL has to work for a living.
So, what's a good approach to scaling up MySQL on a VM? Add more
memory? Add more cores? (How's MySQL 5.5-ubuntu do for multicore?) We
can trivially add more Squids, and we haven't doubled up on Apache but
shirley that won't be entirely unfeasible.
- d.