High Scalability Building bigger, faster, more reliable websites.

Update 2: EBay's Randy Shoup spills the secrets of how to service hundreds of millions of users and over two billion page views a day in Scalability Best Practices: Lessons from eBay on InfoQ. The practices: Partition by Function, Split Horizontally, Avoid Distributed Transactions, Decouple Functions Asynchronously, Move Processing To Asynchronous Flows, Virtualize At All Levels, Cache Appropriately.
Update: eBay Serves 5 Billion API Calls Each Month. Aren't we seeing more and more traffic driven by mashups composed on top of open APIs? APIs are no longer a bolt on, they are your application. Architecturally that argues for implementing your own application around the same APIs developers and users employ.

Who hasn't wondered how eBay does their business? As one of the largest most loaded websites in the world, it can't be easy. And the subtitle of the presentation hints at how creating such a monster system requires true engineering: Striking a balance between site stability, feature velocity, performance, and cost.

You may not be able to emulate how eBay scales their system, but the issues and possible solutions are worth learning from.

One of the most interesting new features of Oracle 11 is the new function result caching mechanism. Until now, making sure that a PL/SQL function gets executed only as many times as necessary was a black art. The new caching system makes that quite easy -- here is how it works.

People sometimes wonder why Oracle isn't mentioned on this site more. Maybe it will now as Michael Nygard reports Oracle 11g now does read/write splitting with their Active Data Guard product. Average replication latency was 1 second and it's accomplished with standard Oracle JDBC drivers. They see a 250% increase in transactions per service for read-write service. And a 110% improvement in tps for read-only service was found. You see a change in hardware architecture with the new setup. They now recommend using a primary and multiple standby servers, a single controller per server, and a single set of disks in RAID1. Previously the recommendation was to have a primary and secondary server with two controllers per server and a set of mirrored disks per controller. The changes increase performance, availability, and hardware utilization. They also have a useful looking best practices document for High Availability called Maximum Availability Architecture (MAA).

This is a wonderfully informative Amazon update based on Joachim Rohde's discovery of an interview with Amazon's CTO. You'll learn about how Amazon organizes their teams around services, the CAP theorem of building scalable systems, how they deploy software, and a lot more. Many new additions from the ACM Queue article have also been included.

Amazon grew from a tiny online bookstore to one of the largest stores on earth. They did it while pioneering new and interesting ways to rate, review, and recommend products. Greg Linden shared is version of Amazon's birth pangs in a series of blog articles