I'm looking to create a website to publish exam results for over **60,000 students**. The main challenge is that many of them will try to access the site simultaneously to check their results. I'm curious about the best software stack or hosting setup to manage such high traffic effectively. Should I choose Apache or Nginx, or is there something better? Should I stick with PHP and MySQL, or consider a more scalable backend? I'm also interested in caching, CDN, and load balancing strategies. I need a solution that can be deployed quickly and will support this load without crashing. Has anyone dealt with similar traffic for exam results? What setup do you recommend?
5 Answers
Honestly, 60,000 isn't too many users to handle. PHP/MySQL should suffice. Just make sure to do some load testing with front-end replicas and possibly add Varnish for caching static parts. You'll be good to go!
To handle this, it's important not just to use the best web server but to have multiple instances across different machines. PHP/MySQL can definitely manage the load. Setting it up on a cloud provider with auto-scaling can help you deal with traffic spikes seamlessly.
In my experience publishing results for millions, using PHP/MariaDB works well. We implemented two levels of caching: Varnish for internal caching plus a CDN for public access. For your case, Varnish should be adequate.
The way the results are accessed matters a lot. If they can just use a specific URL to view results, you might not need a complex setup at all. Static HTML pages on an S3 bucket could handle traffic from a million students without a hitch.
Cloudflare offers affordable serverless options that could also be useful, like their D1 database, workers, and pages. These can help manage your infrastructure efficiently.
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