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

Olmo 3 is a fully open LLM - 22nd November 2025
Nano Banana Pro aka gemini-3-pro-image-preview is the best available image generation model - 20th November 2025
How I automate my Substack newsletter with content from my blog - 19th November 2025

databases 110 mysql 81 netlog 1 php 181 scaling 147 sharding 13

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