[NFBCS] hosting a website for a semi large quantity of users in a short period of time

Sun Dec 11 20:55:38 UTC 2022

Hi Derrick,
This is an excellent question.  Not frivolous at all; don't sell yourself short.  As a software engineering leader for over 20 years I see people at all skill levels struggle with sizing systems.  The more you do, the greater understanding you'll have, however you'll always be learning and technology will always be changing.

I agree with Aaron on this one, I do not know Flask but the numbers you're talking about can be handled by a pretty lightweight machine unless the images being uploaded are going through some intense transcoding to multiple formats (beyond  maybe 1 or 2 if any at all).  

Sounds like a good fundraiser.  I wish the group well.

Best,
Charles

-----Original Message-----
From: NFBCS <nfbcs-bounces at nfbnet.org> On Behalf Of Aaron Cannon via NFBCS
Sent: Sunday, December 11, 2022 2:14 PM
To: NFB in Computer Science Mailing List <nfbcs at nfbnet.org>
Cc: Aaron Cannon <cannona at fireantproductions.com>
Subject: Re: [NFBCS] hosting a website for a semi large quantity of users in a short period of time

Hi.

No shame in using Flask. It's a perfectly good framework for a small project like this. Django would probably be overkill.

As for your question, it's unlikely that any reasonably modern server would even blink at those numbers. So grab yourself a gig of ram, and don't worry about it. As long as your provider is giving you a standard amount of CPU with that, you'll be fine.

But if you want to be absolutely certain, you can use any number of http benchmarking tools to see how many visitors it would take to knock things over. Worst case scenario, users could get queued up a bit, and have to wait a couple seconds before their request is serviced, but based on your numbers, that sounds unlikely.

Good luck.

On Sun, Dec 11, 2022 at 14:04 Derrick Day via NFBCS <nfbcs at nfbnet.org>
wrote:

> Hello, my name is Derrick day. I would like to preface all of this by 
> saying that I am a highschool, 11th grade, 16 year old computer 
> science student and so I may ask a question in this email that seems 
> dumb to all of you more experienced system admins and professionals, 
> but I just don’t want to embarrass myself in my project, so I figured 
> I would run it by some experts. I am leading a fund razer for my local 
> NFB chapter where I made a scavenger hunt website. People can go to 
> the different destinations on the list, and then upload a picture of 
> their group at the destination. All of that is created, and it is 
> using the flask framework with python as its backend. Don’t make fun 
> of me too hard, I know Django is better, but I don’t know how to use 
> it super well yet and they told me about this last week, with a finish 
> date of the 28th of this month. I have gotten that site to run on an 
> apache server through a WSGI broker, however I’m concerned about 
> server resources. I’m expecting anywhere from 4-600 users over the 
> span of 3 days, and I don’t want the server to get overloaded and go 
> down under the stress of peak utilization. According to my 
> calculations, I would statistically have 16.6 or 17 users using my 
> site concurrently, so What would be your suggestions when it comes to 
> required server resources? Is it better to get one stronger server 
> with more processing ability and a higher amount of RAM, or to get 2-3 
> smaller servers? If it’s the latter, what is the best way to load 
> balance between the different hosting servers and make it so the load 
> is distributed? I thank you all for your help, you have no idea how 
> amazing and awesome it is to have a group that I can send an email to 
> for assistance and incite about these things. Again, I’m sorry if this 
> matter seems frivolous, I hope to be in a place one day where this will be a mundane task for me as well. I look forward to your responses, and I hope you all have a merry Christmas or otherwise a happy holiday season.
>
> Thanks,
> Derrick C. Day
>
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