Hi, I have a project where we might get some spikes in access (in the thousand of users accessing at the same time), and I need to know that Netlify can handle this easily, but I cannot find any information on Netlify’s capacity, only on the bandwidth limits. Is there any information about how much traffic Netlify can handle, and does this change depending on the plan? As an extreme example, if I had 100.000 users fetch a 1MB website at the same time (but just once), would I be ok with the free plan (100GB bandwidth limit), could Netlify handle this?
Thanks so much for reaching out, and welcome to the Netlify Forums! You can check out our pricing page here, which outlines the bandwidth allotted to each Netlify plan.
Can you share a bit more about the type of project you plan on launching? This will help me answer your questions better. Thanks!
Hi Hillary, thank you for your reply.
The project is really simple, for the purpose of this conversation you can imagine it’s a landing page, just one with some viral potential, which is why we need to understand Netlify’s capacity.
So, I already know about the bandwidth limits, that’s not the problem, what I need to understand is just if on the free plan I have the access to the same traffic capacity (capacity for concurrent accesses) as on higher plans, or in other words, if I get tens of thousands of people accessing the website at once, as long as I don’t go over the bandwidth limits, Netlify handles it fine?
Netlify handles the traffic fine. But, we usually ask our users to let us know in advance if they’re going to experience high traffic. This is so that our reliability team doesn’t think of this as an attack and disable your website. We usually ask for the following (best estimates):
Date and time (with timezone) of the traffic spike along with duration
Distribution (is it globally spread or concentrated to a single location)
Page views
If you’re using Netlify Functions (and expecting them to have a traffic spike too)
CDN traffic is usually not a problem, but Functions might run into problems at extremely high invocations.
The campaign should start on the first week of January (not sure how long it will last, but should be quite short lived), so we expect a traffic spike when the campaign starts (as it will start through an email sent to thousands of people), but there might be others if the website get viral on Reddit or Hacker News, for example.
Globally spread
No idea here, it totally depends on how viral this becomes, it might stay in the low thousands but has potential to hit millions.
Alright, if at all you get any better estimates like the exact dates and times of the event, that would be better. But we have some info for now.
We also recommend a few things:
If you’re using external DNS, make sure your primary custom domain is the www subdomain.
Make sure your files are not huge in size (usually lesser than 1 MB) so Netlify is able to cache and so it doesn’t overload our servers in case it goes in millions.
Sorry for the necromancy, but how high should the spike be when it is necessary to tell Netlify in advance? We’re just having a spike to about 1000 users immediately after a ticket release but from current quite low traffic.
1000 users might not be something you should be worried about. While there’s no good number, but it’s definitely much higher. However, even with 1000 users, if you’re expecting too much bandwidth usage, or big file streams, it’s always good to let us know.
Thank you for the answers I’ve found them very useful. I am also expecting decent volume through my site over the next couple of weeks (can provide more accurate timeframes of course). Is the best place to raise this on here? Can you action any changes form here? Ive sent an email to support but am a bit hesitant as it says 4 working days. Anything we can do here?
Sorry to bring back thread from the dead, but what do you mean by “file”? I have some images in blog posts that I believe are well over 1 mb. Should I not do that?
Hrishikesh was making general recommendations about about to achieve the best performance at Netlify. The larger a file is the more likely it is to be ejected from the cache. That said, we will cache files over 1 MiB if their is heavy traffic for them. You are free to use files larger than 1 MiB but they will be ejected from the cache more frequently then if they were smaller.
Hi quick question.
We are using Nuxt 3, so Netlify Functions is used.
Since @hrishikesh has written:
How many users do we expect?
We are expecting, due to a product release, about 5000+ Users who are joining and visiting the website all at once. Last year we haven’t had this kind of setup yet (Nuxt, Netlify) and about ~4k Users visited the site and it was unreachable. This was one of the main reasons why we switched to Nuxt and Netlify.
When do we expect them?
13.6.2024, 16:00 (Europe/Austria => CEST)
How long may they visit?
I guess about an hour. Since the page they are visiting is hosting a live stream. (Via iframe)
Which site?
My client’s one: c16e2b84-6150-4fbc-9845-8849194becfa
I’d appreciate a confirmation that Netfliy can handle this as well. Or at least is able to scale horizontally on a traffic peak.
Thanks in Advance!
Functions are a problem only in the following event: Lambda function scaling - AWS Lambda (amazon.com). Netlify Functions are deployed on AWS Lambda. Multiple sites share the same AWS account. So in a hypothetical event where 1000 functions are invoked, all at the same time, then the 1001st function would fail. It would work when one of those functions finishes its task.
While this limitation exists, I have also not seen anyone run into this. So I can say based on past experience, you should be good to go. But, as for the previous cases, I can’t completely guarantee that absolutely nothing would happen.
I apologize for following up on an old thread. I have a similar situation that I’d like to announce. I’ve already informed technical support, but I’m wondering if it’s necessary also to announce it here.
Hello, I have a similar query about traffic (fingers crossed this is the appropriate thread).
(apologies for the short notice I only just realised this might be an issue against the deadline so posting this as a hail Mary. Also like confused if visitors is individual people or how many times it’s opened new to coding forgive my noobines)
Date and time: 30th of October 2024 rough guessing the time 10am-3pm (GMT+3) hard to estimate when in that window the website might pick up
Distribution: Single location
Page views: 800-1000ish (that’s if I’m understanding correctly; people opening multiple times a 6 page website? About 2mb ?)
new to coding forgive my noobines)