One of the challenges of maintaining the website, is to manage load. Under normal circumstances, things work well. Recently, we had a number of users that were using download managers. Normally, that is OK too. But they all chose to do it at the same time. The impact? The CPU load of the server went high, and new requests were failing.

So. Whats the answer? The existing setup is using Apache. That works, but it could work better. It uses lots of CPU and memory, which in turn makes things slow. There are faster alternatives, but they are not integrated so well into our overall setup.

To get the best of both worlds, I created a seperate web server running nginx just for downloads. Everything else is still working the way it was... but downloads can now happen much faster.

This is all new, and there may be some glitches during the early days. But let me know of any problems and I'll try to sort it out.

Czokie