139 items tagged “scaling”
2007
The top 10 presentations on scaling websites: twitter, Flickr, Bloglines, Vox and more. I normally avoid linking to “top 10” lists on principle, but this one pulls together some great resources and adds extra context to each one.
Capacity Planning for LAMP (via) John Allspaw’s MySQL Conf 2007 talk on capacity planning (John is Operations Engineering Manager at Flickr).
Scaling Twitter (via) Slides from Blaine’s recent talk.
In the big picture, Twitter did exactly the right thing. They had a good idea and they buckled down and focused on delivering something as cool as possible as fast as possible, and it's really hard, in early 2007, to beat Rails for that. When all of a sudden there were a few tens of thousands of people using it, then they went to work on the scaling.
— Tim Bray
The promise [of J2EE] was that of infinite scalability based on tooling, which assumes that designing scalable systems is a general case problem. I now firmly believe that this is flawed reasoning. Frameworks don't solve scalability problems, design solves scalability problems.
Rails and Scaling with Multiple Databases. Ryan Tomayko explains how his team spreads a high traffic Rails application across five separate PostgreSQL databases by giving each client their own schema—similar to how WordPress MU scales.
None of these scaling approaches are as fun and easy as developing for Rails. All the convenience methods and syntactical sugar that makes Rails such a pleasure for coders ends up being absolutely punishing, performance-wise.
— Alex Payne, Twitter
Scaling Python for High-Load Web Sites. Slides from a talk at PyCon. Be sure to switch to the notes view (Ø in the bottom right)—a really nice overview of scaling up from a CGIs to load balanced, memcached Python application servers.
Data::ObjectDriver. Benjamin Trott’s Perl ORM, with built in support for both caching and data partitioning. I think this is what Six Apart uses for Vox.
A brief update with some numbers for hardware load-balanced mongrels. 4000 requests/second on 48 mongrels behind a hardware load balancer.
At some point in the past rolling out an application to 300,000 people was the pinnacle of engineering excellence. Today it means you passed your second round of funding and can move out of your parents garage.
Inside MySpace.com. Case study of scaling against a network effect. Includes pretty honest coverage of the mistakes made along the way, although the article was put together second hand from conference presentations rather than from interviews.
2006
Curse launches with Django platform. Handles 500k visits/hour!
The Architecture of Mailinator. 3 million e-mails a day on a 2GHz server with 1GB of RAM.
punupgeek.com on Active Resource. Looks like 37 signals might be looking in to scaling across multiple servers using web services.
2005
Ruby on Rails and FastCGI: Scaling using processes instead of threads. Relates to the shared-nothing architecture.
2004
Photo Matt: RSS Bandwidth Usage. Matt makes the case for RSS scaling just fine if you’re smart about it.
Transcript of Bruce Sterling at Microsoft Corporation (via) Bruce Sterling on scaling up his annual SxSW party. I can’t believe I missed it htis year.
New Technorati Infrastructure beta test! (via) It certainly feels faster