Update 3: Always Refer to Your V1 As a Prototype. You really do have to plan to throw one away.
Update 2: Lessons Learned Scaling the Audiogalaxy Search Engine. Things he should have done and fun things he couldn’t justify doing.
Update: Design details of Audiogalaxy.com’s high performance MySQL search engine. At peak times, the search engine needed to handle 1500-2000 searches every second against a MySQL database with about 200 million rows.

Search was one of most interesting problems at Audiogalaxy. It was one of the core functions of the site, and somewhere between 50 to 70 million searches were performed every day. At peak times, the search engine needed to handle 1500-2000 searches every second against a MySQL database with about 200 million rows.