Resolving Overloaded Webserver Issues

Question

I am new to the area of web development and currently interviewing companies, the most favorite questions among what people ask is:

How do you scale your webserver if it starts hitting a million queries?

What would you do if you have just one database instance running at that time? how do you manage that?

These questions are really interesting and I would like to learn about them.
Please pour in your suggestions / practices (that you follow) for such scenarios

Thank you

Answer 1

How to scale:

• Identify your bottlenecks.
• Identify the correct solution for the problem.
• Check to see you you can implement the correct solution.
• Identify alternate solution and check

Typical Scaling Options:

• Vertical Scaling (bigger, faster server hardware)
• Load balancing
• Split tiers/components out onto more/other hardware
• Offload work through caching/cdn

Database Scaling Options:

• Vertical Scaling (bigger, faster server hardware)
• Replication (active or passive)
• Clustering (if DBMS supports it)
• Sharding