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Whenever I release my Apple app, my servers get blown out.

Is there a way to throttle the number of downloads per hour or per day?

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closed as off topic by Jeff Atwood Apr 12 '11 at 7:18

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9 Answers 9

up vote 15 down vote
+100

If you can't scale up the servers, scale up the price.

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I can't imagine apple will allow you to throttle downloads from their AppStore.

However, you could consider scaling your server architecture using some sort of cloud platform e.g. Amazon EC2 or ServerLove etc etc.

That way on the days of your release, you can scale up your architecture and scale down when you don't need it (making it cheaper).

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What do you mean? Downloads of the application? Apple stores the downloads on their servers, so how would it affect yours?

EDIT: If you do mean the server's that support the functionality of your app, then I don't think that there's much that you can do. You can't limit the amount of downloads from the App Store. The only other option would be to limit the amount of requests your app makes to your servers. I would be careful with that because if limiting requests made your app unusable for some period of time, Apple would likely reject it.

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You could do some bandwidth shaping in the network in front of your server, if you have access to it. You may end up with some annoyed users if the shaping causes the app to perform slowly.

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Try a server that has cluster ability, such as mediatemple.net, they are perfect for "burst" type of traffic. I had such sites too, traffic can be dead for several weeks, then it hits the frontpage of reddit/digg, and I get 30k visitors in 1 hour, used to kill my shared hosting server instantly, until I got mediatemple's cluster (slightly more expensive than shared hosting I admit), everything's fine now. Mediatemple basically give you 1000 credits (cpu time) per month on their huge cluster, as long as you only burst and not have sustained high traffic, you'd be fine.

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I'm going to assume you mean throttling of requests from your app.

Invest in better hardware (Amazon EC2 is a good solution for cheap scalability), or risk getting overloaded servers that results in giving your users a bad experience, which will probably end up in bad AppStore ratings.

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Try to reduce the Data usage of your App if you can't scale up the server. Do caching, put Data inside the App Bundle, reduce the Size of everything that is not necessary. You could even let the users wait a random time, before they can use the App.

But if you can: Scale up the Servers!

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Use cloud servers (Ex: rackspace, amazon web services). You can programmatically launch new servers using cloud services. You pay by the hour. It's good for handling spikes.

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The applications which people download on their iPhones/iPads/iPods are stored on Apple's servers, so that's not related to your servers.

If your app is using the server for requesting/storing info, all the hardware solutions point to a cloud hosting solution.

Software-wise, you could use something like http://liftweb.net/.

Unfortunately, there is no easy way of solving this.

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