High Scalability Building bigger, faster, more reliable websites.

Hi, if you were to design your own highly scalable website from scratch, what technologies would you use?

Based on Web 2.0 popularity, LAMP seems to be high in the running. But would you tack on CakePHP? Drupal? or build your framework/CMS from scratch?

What version of Linux runs best for a scalable website?

Would you consider Windows and .NET? Java? Or do you want to throw a brick at me for even suggesting such heresies?

Would you prefer Postgres, Tomcat, Perl, Python, or any of that other *NIX fancy stuff...why or why not?

Please forget for the moment, "use what you know" argument. I am pretty versatile, and can look for an expert in whatever platform I choose. So all skills being equal, I'm looking for the best community support, the fastest development time and most importantly, the best scaling approach.

Let's say, for fun, that I'm planning for the website to have as many messages going back & forth as an eBay.

Definitely building this on a budget..

Jason

In The Architectures You've Always Wondered About track at the Qcon conference, Second Life, eBay, Yahoo, LinkedIn and Orbitz presented how they dealt with different aspects of their applications, such as scalability. There were quite a few lessons that I learned that day that I thought were worth sharing.

The details are provided below:

Lessons from Yahoo, eBay, Orbitz, LinkedIn architecture

There is a lot of information in the blogosphere describing the architecture of many popular sites, such as Google, Amazon, eBay, LinkedIn, TypePad, WikiPedia and others.

I've summarized this issue in a blog post here

I would really appreciate your opinion on this matter.