Our site is getting a bit popular - getting about 5000 concurrent users at a time - and occasionally it’s too much for our server to handle (we think during updates)
We’ve looked at load balancing, but it’s beyond what we can set up.
Our site is basically static html files (with php extensions) - so if we enabled the “cache all” feature - the site could basically run from cloudflare cache.
But my question is - even when run from cache, does our server still get a “hit” or request from each of the users antway?
So if 5000 people were on our index.php page this second - and the cache everything feature was enabled, would our server still get 5000 hits, or would it be 0 as it’s cached by cloudflare?
The first time a URL is requested in a location where the cache is empty or expired, you would get a request to your origin server. This is called a cache MISS. Once the cache is populated in that location, all subsequent requests for the same URL in that location would be a cache HIT until the TTL expires.
Hence if you have 5000 requests, a small % of those would be MISS and the rest would be a cache HIT. A HIT means the request was served from cache without talking to your origin.