Your WordPress site should be able to handle a decent amount of traffic, assuming it’s hosted on a fairly reliable server. But what happens if your site is featured on a website like Digg, and all of the sudden your site is getting hit with tens of thousands of visitors at once? Chances are, your site will be overwhelmed with the amount of incoming connections to the database and your site will fail to display for most users. Luckily, there is a neat plugin to help you survive these traffic spikes.

One way to get around this issue is to install a plugin called wp-cache.  This plugin is neat because it generates an HTML page once a post has been published and saves it in a static cache file.  Calling upon the cache file to display the post will greatly reduce the amount of database connections needed when the post is accessed.

The plugin also lets you specify certain pages you don’t want cached for those “just-in-case” scenarios.

Outside of WordPress (and if you have access), you can set certain connection and timeout limits on your MySQL and Apache installations to help control the strain on your server.

What do you do to survive high traffic spikes on your WordPress installation?