New Matomo Servers

General questions
1

Hi,

We’ve been using Matomo in somewhat of a trial capacity and it’s been working fantastic, thank you. We’re about to go live and need to establish some additional servers very quickly, a few questions

  1. When a server running Matomo hit’s a performance threshold (CPU or other server resources maxed out), what is the impact to the end user client experience. For example if we’re monitoring example.com and our matomo server is matomo.example.com, when the website visitor visits the example.com/about page and the script is called but the Matomo server isn’t responding as it should, does the visitor page load experience detiorate or fail? Is there any way to prevent that (using config, not more Matomo server resources)?

  2. I’m aware of the tracking code config option to call multiple Matomo services from a single page (thanks @Lukas). Please describe or quantify the performance payload to having a secondary Matomo server being called from the same page? Is it significant or negligible? We have a dispersed architecture containing many subdomains which could lend itself to many configurations. I’m just considering if we use a primary script for specific subdomains, and a secondary backup script across all pages. This gives us backup coverage if an individual subdomain/server resource has a lot of traffic.

  3. When we installed our trial/temporary service, I’m pretty sure we just allocated a DNS cname (which could be anywhere). Please confirm can we standup new matomo servers and assign them whatever CNAMEs later i.e. the Matomo install is not bound to a particular domain name? This gives us options for resilience or scaling/moving later.

  4. Previously I did a Softaculous install on an inexpensive host which was just temporary. We now want to stand up 3 or more servers probably using Digital Ocean and Hetzner. I’ve just been recommended Caprover which seems an easy option to get a server in place. Please any known issues or experience with using a Caprover & Matomo installation? Or any other recommended platforms for a own install?

  5. If anyone on the forum has knowledge and verifiable skills/experience installing Caprover/Matomo solutions (or something equivalent/ very similar), please let me know your availability and cost to standup 3 servers in next 24hrs.

We’re going live with a new service which may take off with a sudden acceleration (perhaps it won’t, but of course we’ll try and be ready). It’s highly preferable to have Matomo in place to get some insights on activity.

Thank you

Matt

2

Hi,

  1. This is a great point. If your Matomo server can’t respond to the matomo.php request because it is overloaded it should not affect a website user at all. Matomo is loaded deferred and async and so it should only start doing anything once the website has finished loading at al.
    Of course don’t write any Javascript on your site in a way that breaks when e.g. window.Matomo doesn’t exist because matomo.js doesn’t load.

  2. From a website visitor point of view, I don’t think it matters too much if the website makes one or two requests to matomo.php as the requests should be really small.
    On the backend of course you then have the same load on two servers.

  3. You can change the domain of Matomo anytime, but the new one needs to be in trusted_hosts[] in config/config.ini.php for Matomo to work.

  4. I can’t talk much about Softaculous, Caprover, etc., but Matomo is just a regular PHP-Application. So you need to install PHP, a webserver (Apache, nginx, etc.) and MySQL or MariaDB just like for most other similar websites.
    https://matomo.org/docs/optimize-how-to/ might help you with a few performance-related tips.

I hope this helps a bit with your setup.

3

Hi Lukas, That’s very helpful, thank you for these answers. Matt