Prepare services for high load#
If you are expecting higher than usual traffic on your Aiven services, you can follow the recommendations and best practices detailed below ahead of time to make sure you have the best tools and your service is ready to sustain high loads.
Tip
If your services are already experiencing high load, under-performing or requiring extra resource, read short term suggestion to handle the load.
Monitor service health#
Subscribe for service notifications#
To receive notifications about the service health, you can set the appropriate emails in Aiven Console:
Go to your project, and select Settings from the sidebar.
In the Settings page, include relevant email addresses in the Technical Emails section.
The specified email addressees will receive notifications related to plan size change, performance, outages and upcoming maintenance.
Warning
If no technical emails are specified, Aiven sends some high priority messages to the project admin(s).
Therefore, if some technical support members are not admins, they might be missing important notifications for your services.
Subscribe to platform status updates#
The Aiven services are managed by the Aiven platform, therefore is a good idea to check its status and receive notifications in case of platform wide incidents. You can follow the RSS feed, subscribe for email or SMS notifications, or use the Slack integration to get notified where your team is already.
You can check the status of the the Aiven platform and subscribe to updates on incidents directly from status.Aiven.io.
Monitor the services#
It’s difficult to prepare for high load if the usual load is not monitored. Check out how to setup adequate monitoring for your needs in Monitoring services.
Modify the service plan#
If you forecast a load that can’t be handled by the current service plan, you can decide either to scale up your service plan, or request a custom plan if none of the available plans satisfies your requirements.
Define the backups schedule#
During the backup process, you may experience a temporary higher load. It is therefore recommended to perform them outside of your peak traffic hours to lower the impact.
For Aiven for PostgreSQL® and Aiven for MySQL® services, you can configure the time in the day when the daily backups are taken by setting the backup_hour and backup_minute variables in Aiven Console > your service’s Overview page > the Advanced configuration section.
Tip
If you intend to make a plan upgrade, it is a good idea to do it shortly after a full backup is taken. This reduces the amount of incremental changes that need to be applied on top of the base backup and therefore speeds up the upgrade itself.
Define the maintenance schedule#
Similar to backups, it is important to make sure your maintenance windows are configured correctly.
Tip
Plan maintenance updates outside of your peak traffic hours and days. Optional updates will not be automatically installed unless you apply them yourself or a mandatory update is created.
Run load test on service forks#
To test the impact on high traffic on a service, you can run load tests against copies of your production service using the fork service option option in Aiven Console > your service’s Overview page > Fork Database > New database fork.
Perform service specific optimizations#
Optimizing a service allows it to perform better under stress therefore avoiding the need of an upgrade. The more optimized a service is for your usage, the better you can weather spikes in traffic.