High Scalability Building bigger, faster, more reliable websites.

Several months ago I attended a Joyent presentation where the spokesman hinted that Joyent had the chops to support a one billion page per month Facebook Ruby on Rails application. Even under a few seconds of merciless grilling he would not give up the name of the application. Now we have the big reveal: it was LinkedIn's Bumper Sticker app. For those not currently sticking things on bumps, Bumper Sticker is quite surprisingly a viral media sharing application that allows users to express their individuality by sticking small virtual stickers on Facebook profiles. At the time I was quite curious how Joyent's cloud approach could be leveraged for this kind of app. Now that they've released a few details, we get to find out.

Shanti Braford details how his Ruby on Rails based website survived a 24 hour 550,000+ pageview digg attack. His post cleanly lays out all the juicy setup details, so there's not much I can add.

Hosting costs $370 a month for 1 web server, 1 database server, and sufficient bandwidth. The site is built on RoR, nginx, MySQL, and 7 mongrel servers. He thinks Rails 2.0 has improved performance and credits database avoidance and fragment caching for much of the performance boost.

Keep in mind his system is relatively static, but it's a very interesting and useful experience report.