Our website was overloaded, how to solve it ?

We developed a website, and recently we found that our website was overloaded:

1. One single server can not process all requests effectively.
2. Our database can not save all the data, and the connection is usually not enough.
3. Our network bandwidth is not enough for all request.

I want to know how can we solve these problems ? What is the popular ways of solving these ?

Thanks in advance !

From serverfault Hooligan

• • Get a faster computer for frontend
  • Get a faster computer for the database
  • Get a faster network connection

  Yeah, all of those cost money. But probably less money that going through all your code to optimize it, unless you have a some massive inefficiencies that are easy to pinpoint. But if everything (web server, DB and network) is overloaded, it doesn't sound like it.

  hobbs : On the flip side, almost everyone has some massive inefficiencies hiding somewhere :)

  Hooligan : if i can easy add a server ,then it's not a problem
  From Michael Borgwardt

• It may be possible to reduce your bandwidth requirements and reduce your server load by reducing HTTP Requests by a number of simple performance tweaks. Setting far-future expiration dates on static content, combining files like css sprites, combining javascript and css. You could also do with outsourcing jQuery and other Javascript libraries to Google using their free Google AJAX Libraries API.

  From Duncan

• A few dead-tree recommendations to help you in the long run:

  • High Performance Web Sites by Steve Souders
  • Even Faster Web Sites by Steve Souders
  • Scalable Internet Architectures by Theo Schlossnagle
  • The Art of Capacity Planning by John Allspaw

  There are several websites that outline Steve's performance guidelines that you can easily find through a Google search. Most of them will help reduce the number of requests and speed up the remaining ones. Theo's book, however, is invaluable in regards to building out scalable systems and I highly recommend giving it a read. John's book is a quick read but will give you insight into how to plan for future expansion.

  From Justin Scott