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

Distributing Go binaries like sqlite-scanner through PyPI using go-to-wheel - 4th February 2026
Moltbook is the most interesting place on the internet right now - 30th January 2026
Adding dynamic features to an aggressively cached website - 28th January 2026

databases 110 mysql 81 netlog 1 php 190 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