Yes, it seems I did not anticipate such traffic and my autoscaling settings did not allow the front end web servers pool to expand big enough. It is times like this I wonder why I switched back to WordPress compared to hosting statically generated content on S3 + Cloud Front :-(. It should be back now, apologies.

Installing a caching plugin and turning it all the way up should solve most of your problems. There is no real need for every request to hit the DB.

Hello,

Yep, the site already uses a caching plugin (w3TotalCache) and it is configured with memcached at the backend. Unfortunately, even with this the site still makes a couple of DB calls with each page load, but nowhere near as many as without the caching. Maybe I'll shove varnish in front of it too for good measure :joy:

If you're using nginx (haven't checked it) microcaching for a bunch of seconds, let's say five seconds, can solve most of this problems and you don't need to add more components.

Nope sorry, still using Apache 2. :-|

Haven't tried this personally, but it might help you...

https://portal.cloudunboxed.net/knowledgebase/33/Nginx-like-...