Extreme Elements now blazingly static

Adam Khan, Monday, April 30th, 2007

As both a travel store and a sports media destination, traffic at extremeelements.com spikes during competition time. With the new site’s complex pages her first outing was a disappointment, the server frequently becoming overwhelmed and collapsing. A workaround entitled “publish static” now provides a blazingly fast, stable site and at least one added benefit besides.

Extremeelements.com is one of those: very attractive but with a split personality. As an online travel store, traffic is relatively small, steady and growing, but as a media destination during world kiteboarding competitions, for which the site provides some of the most detailed and speedy news coverage, traffic spikes dramatically. The first world kiteboarding competition covered using the new Made with Engaging site was Movistar Kiteboarding World Cup 2007 in Isla Margarita, Venezuela and unfortunately the server collapsed frequently throughout the competition due to the traffic load.

The problem was that although each competition page on the site is designed to appear simple and straightforward, it is nonetheless chock-full of dynamic information, grabbing a number of daily commentaries, each in turn grabbing a couple of dozen photos, most of which grab at least one depicted competitor for their captions, each of which in turn grabs his or her sponsor. The page also grabs and lists all the hotels and centers at the competition location with whom Extreme Elements partners. This, combined with the rest of the template, which is also dynamic and packed with information, such as the latest three top-level travel offers, is pushing the envelope for the server at its current configuration. With the built-in caching system of the site’s ExpressionEngine content management system switched off, each page load requires many database queries, but with caching fully on, the server must make many reads and writes to lots of little cache files. Either way the server was overwhelmed.

Solution

The solution has been to create a static HTML version of the site, which is much simpler for the server. While the dynamically-generated version continues to exist alongside it, only site editors know the URL, so traffic to it is kept at almost zero. When site editors are logged in and view a dynamically-generated page, they see a small “publish static” button at the bottom right. When clicked, this button triggers a small CGI script that grabs the HTML output of the dynamic page from whence it was called, and writes it to a static HTML file using the same path.

Results

The result is that site editors can now get a live preview of their work and a website that loads blazingly fast, all ready for the next competition, PKRA 2007 Austria, Monday 30 April – Sunday 6 May, 2007.