Setting up IPv6 on Linode with nginx

So Linode has gotten onto the IPv6 bandwagon. In addition to each Linode getting an IPv6 address, they will also gladly assign an entire /64 netblock to your specific node on request. That gives you all sorts of flexibility for bringing up IPv6 services. And this blog post is going to be all about how to make use of multiple IPv6 addresses.

As of this writing, everything I mention will work on a Linode running Ubuntu 12.04 LTS and Nginx 1.1. There’s no reason that these instructions shouldn’t work on other distros or versions of Ubuntu with some modifications.

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Scaling Anthrocon’s Website to Handle 1,400 Simultaneous Connections

The Challenge

When hotel reservations open, that is the single busiest time of the year for Anthrocon’s webserver. In fact, it even caused us performance problems last year. That was not so good.

So this year, I decided to try something different. Instead of leaving the regular website up and running, which involves using Drupal, I instead decided to replace the entire page with a relatively static “countdown” page, which displayed a countdown timer and automatically started displaying the hotel link at 11 AM on the opening day.

First, some stats for the Anthrocon website:

  • Peak bandwidth: 1.6 Megabits/sec
  • Peak connections: 1,400 concurrent connections

And now some status for Passkey, who handled most of the traffic:

  • Peak bandwidth: 190 Megabits/sec
  • Peak connections: 4,000 concurrent connections
Continue reading “Scaling Anthrocon’s Website to Handle 1,400 Simultaneous Connections”