(I guess now's a good time to actually register for HN -- we end up on here often enough...)
Hi, Pine64 sysadmin here... yea, our store doesn't like the big surges of traffic we get around product launches. As I speak, we've been getting about 600 concurrent connections for the last 30 minutes, and at least 450 for the last few hours.
We've done some optimization behind the scenes in anticipation, but it's clearly not enough. We're going to be doing some heavy upgrades right after these preorders close.
I'd recommend setting up WP Super Cache (which you're using now) to serve static HTML files (not sure what caching method you are using). Then you need to configure Apache (or switch to nginx) to actually look for those files, otherwise the plugin won't do much (it generates PHP files by default which are taxing on the server). Another option would be to switch to the Cache Enabler plugin (along with Apache or nginx configuration) - static HTML page caching as simple as it gets. Oh and upgrade PHP.
Edit2: CF would just by default cache your CSS/JS, wouldn't really solve the issues you're experiencing (most likely heavy PHP/MySQL load due to poorly configured caching). That said I haven't looked into the site that much, might be that you have a lot of portions of the site that can't be properly cached but then again most users shouldn't need to be logged in so doubt it.
Trust me, PHP 5.x is going to be one of the first things to go in a few days. Moving to PHP 7 should fix many of our issues in one go -- I hope. Along with a move to nginx (which the rest of our web infrastructure already uses). There's a long story as to why all this hasn't be done previously.
I'll look into changing the caching once we're over the worst of this. Forgive me if I don't want to make significant changes during a massive traffic spike. ;)
Yeah that was my only reservation, but the per-user customisation shouldn't be an issue unless you're logged in or have stuff added to the cart, so a general spike in traffic shouldn't (theoretically) affect it.
After some troubleshooting, it looks like it was actually your computer that was slowing everything down. If you could just stay off the internet forever I think it will be fine.
