Simon Willison’s Weblog

Database Sharding at Netlog, with MySQL and PHP. Detailed MySQL sharding case study from Netlog, who serve five billion page requests a month using thousands of shards across more than 80 database servers.

Posted 2nd March 2009 at 10:22 am

Recent articles

The last six months in LLMs, illustrated by pelicans on bicycles - 6th June 2025
Tips on prompting ChatGPT for UK technology secretary Peter Kyle - 3rd June 2025
How often do LLMs snitch? Recreating Theo's SnitchBench with LLM - 31st May 2025

mysql 64 sharding 12 scaling 142 netlog 1 php 127 databases 105

Monthly briefing

Sponsor me for $10/month and get a curated email digest of the month's most important LLM developments.

Pay me to send you less!

Sponsor & subscribe