title: Best practices for withstanding launch day traffic burst
body: <p>We are working on a website for a client that (for once) is expected to get a fair amount of traffic on day one. There are press releases, people are blogging about it, etc. I am a little concerned that we're going to fall flat on our face on day one. What are the main things you would look at to ensure (in advance without real traffic data) that you can stay standing after a big launch?</p>
  <p>Details: This is a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LAMP_%28software_bundle%29" rel="nofollow noreferrer">L/A/M/PHP</a> stack, using an internally developed MVC framework. This is currently being launched on one server, with Apache and MySQL both on it, but we can break that up if need be.</p>
  <p>We are already installing <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memcached" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Memcached</a> and doing as much PHP-level caching as we can think of. Some of the pages are rather query intensive, and we are using <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smarty_(template_engine)" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Smarty</a> as our template engine. Keep in mind there is no time to change any of these major aspects--this is the just the setup. What sorts of things should we watch out for?</p>