5 Signs Your Website Is About to Crash
The Titanic didn't sink instantly. First came the hit, then water in the holds, and only then — disaster. Your website is the same. It "screams" for help long before it crashes. Do you know how to read these signals?
Key takeaway. Sites do not fall out of nowhere: first TTFB, a full DB pool, swap, rising 5xx, or silent logs. Prometheus/Zabbix alerts should fire before angry customer messages.
Checklist: Symptoms of Imminent Death
*If you see this in logs — call NineLab.
1. TTFB Growth (Time to First Byte)
If the server thinks longer than 200ms before giving the first byte — this is the first bell. It means code or database is already working at the limit.
2. "Too many connections" in DB
Every SQL request requires a connection. If the pool is full, new users just get an error. This is a classic scaling problem.
3. Disk Swap
The scariest sign. When RAM ends, the server starts using HDD/SSD as memory. Disk is 100,000 times slower than RAM. The site turns into a pumpkin instantly.
4. Growth of 5xx Errors
One 500 error per day is an accident. Ten errors per hour is a pattern. 1% errors of total traffic is a fire.
5. Log Silence
Sounds strange, but if logs suddenly stopped writing, maybe you just ran out of disk space. This is "silent death".
Advice: Configure alerts in Zabbix or Prometheus. Learn about problems before your users write an angry tweet.
Next steps
Validate before traffic peaks: load testing, performance audit, pricing.
Related services
Signs your site is about to fall — FAQ
TTFB climbing past ~200 ms, a nearly full DB connection pool, swap instead of RAM, 5xx around 1% of traffic, and sudden log silence (often a full disk). These show up before a 503, not after you are already down.
If the server thinks longer than ~200 ms before the first byte, and your baseline is 100–120 ms, code or the database is already at the limit. 800 ms TTFB is not "a bit slow" — it is a queue before failure.
When RAM is gone the disk becomes "memory" and is orders of magnitude slower. The site degrades in a jump: timeouts, 502s, postgres killed by OOM.
Do not wait for an ad peak: alerts in Zabbix/Prometheus, check the DB pool, disk and RAM, then an audit or load test. Ten 500s an hour is a pattern, not a fluke.
Want to apply this in practice?
Tell us about your system — we’ll propose a work plan and the metrics worth fixing in an SLA/SLO.
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