High Scalability Building bigger, faster, more reliable websites.

How do you evaluate and decide which web technologies (and there are myriads out there) to use for your new web application, which one potentially gives you the best performance, which one will likely give you the shortest time-to-market? The Apache incubator project Olio might help.

Olio is a is an open source web 2.0 toolkit to help evaluate the suitability, functionality and performance of web technologies. Olio defines an example web2.0 application (an events site somewhat like yahoo.com/upcoming) and provides three initial implementations : PHP, Java EE and RubyOnRails (ROR). The toolkit also defines ways to drive load against the application in order to measure performance.

Apache Olio could be used to

• Understand how to use various web 2.0 technologies such as AJAX, memcached, mogileFS etc. Use the code in the application to understand the subtle complexities involved and how to get around issues with these technologies.
• Evaluate the differences in the three implementations: php, ruby and java to understand which might best work for your situation.
• Within each implementation, evaluate different infrastructure technologies by changing the servers used (e.g: apache vs lighttpd, mysql vs postgre, ruby vs Jruby etc.)
• Drive load against the application to evaluate the performance and scalability of the chosen platform.
• Experiment with different algorithms (e.g. memcache locking, a different DB access API) by replacing portions of code in the application.

Olio started it's life as the web2.0kit developed by Sun Microsystems in colloboration with U.C. Berkeley RAD Lab and was presented on Velocity2008.

• Sun is using Olio to create deployment, reference architecture and performance tuning guides for their customers such as: An Open Source Web Solution - Lighttpd Web Server and Chip Multithreading Technology
• U.C. Berkeley is using Olio in a variety of research projects, the first of which is Cloudstone.
• A few web2.0 companies are using Olio as a training tool to teach their new developers PHP and Rails.

This article explains how Outside.in, the local social network and aggregator, scaled up its service and moved from PHP to Ruby on Rails (they moved maybe because Ruby code seemed to be more maintanable that PHP code?).

The whole article is here on EngineYard blog.

Update 2:: How Digg Works and How Digg Really Works (wear ear plugs). Brought to you straight from Digg's blog. A very succinct explanation of the major elements of the Digg architecture while tracing a request through the system. I've updated this profile with the new information.
Update: Digg now receives 230 million plus page views per month and 26 million unique visitors - traffic that necessitated major internal upgrades.

Traffic generated by Digg's over 22 million famously info-hungry users and 230 million page views can crash an unsuspecting website head-on into its CPU, memory, and bandwidth limits. How does Digg handle billions of requests a month?

Website stats:

Webserver: Apache 2.2
Database: MySQL 5.0
APC cache for php
CMS: Drupal 6.2 (bleeding-edge version)*
*Aggressive caching is ON, Page Compression ON, Block Cache ON (can't use CCS),Optimize CSS/JS ON.
2 Servers: Apache/Mysql (low-tech servers - Celeron processors, 512 MB RAM, 7200 RPM HDD)
Bandwidth 10 Mb/s

The benchmark:

Used ab : ab -n 1000 -c 20 howwhatwho.com

Server Software: Apache/2.2.3
Server Hostname: howwhatwho.com
Server Port: 80
Document Path: /
Document Length: 41639 bytes
Concurrency Level: 20
Time taken for tests: 13.556796 seconds
Complete requests: 1000
Failed requests: 0
Write errors: 0
Total transferred: 42118000 bytes
HTML transferred: 41639000 bytes
Requests per second: 73.76 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request: 271.136 [ms] (mean)
Time per request: 13.557 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate: 3033.90 [Kbytes/sec] received

The Apache server is also running the postifx and bind although they aren't resource intensive applications.
The Cron job for drupal runs every 50 minutes, and the agreggator module is enabled and fetches more than 30 rss feeds every time.

The site used to be hosted on a single Celeron machine but on peak times the CPU went up to 80 %.

Question : Does anybody know a website hosted on an IBM Mainframe? :) Todd?

Update: Flickr hits 2 Billion photos served. That's a lot of hamburgers.

Flickr is both my favorite bird and the web's leading photo sharing site. Flickr has an amazing challenge, they must handle a vast sea of ever expanding new content, ever increasing legions of users, and a constant stream of new features, all while providing excellent performance. How do they do it?

A man had a dream. His dream was to blend a bunch of RSS/Atom/RDF feeds into a single feed. The man is Beau Lebens of Feedville and like most dreamers he was a little short on coin. So he took refuge in the home of a cheap hosting provider and Beau realized his dream, creating FEEDblendr. But FEEDblendr chewed up so much CPU creating blended feeds that the cheap hosting provider ordered Beau to find another home. Where was Beau to go? He eventually found a new home in the virtual machine room of Amazon's EC2. This is the story of how Beau was finally able to create his one feeds safe within the cradle of affordable CPU cycles.

Fotolog, a social blogging site centered around photos, grew from about 300 thousand users in 2004 to over 11 million users in 2007. Though they initially experienced the inevitable pains of rapid growth, they overcame their problems and now manage over 300 million photos and 800,000 new photos are added each day. Generating all that fabulous content are 20 million unique monthly visitors and a volunteer army of 30,000 new users each day. They did so well a very impressed suitor bought them out for a cool $90 million. That's scale meets success by anyone standards. How did they do it?

This presentation by Michael Radwin describes why Yahoo! had standardized on PHP going forward. It describes how after reviewing all the web technologies including their own internal ones, PHP was choosen. It shows that not only technical reasons , but also business and development processes were taken into account.

Wikimedia is the platform on which Wikipedia, Wiktionary, and the other seven wiki dwarfs are built on. This document is just excellent for the student trying to scale the heights of giant websites. It is full of details and innovative ideas that have been proven on some of the most used websites on the internet.

eAccelerator is a free open-source PHP accelerator, optimizer, and dynamic content cache. It increases the performance of PHP scripts by caching them in their compiled state, so that the overhead of compiling is almost completely eliminated. It also optimizes scripts to speed up their execution. eAccelerator typically reduces server load and increases the speed of your PHP code by 1-10 times.

ThemBid provides a market where people needing work done broadcast their request and accept bids from people competing for the job. Unlike many of the sites profiled at HighScalability, ThemBid is not in the popular press as often as Paris Hilton. It's not a media darling or a giant of the industry. But what I like is they have a strategy, a point-of-view for building websites and were gracious enough to share very detailed instructions on how to go about building a website. They even delve into actual installation details of the various software packages they use. Anyone can benefit by taking a look at their work.

Friendster is one of the largest social network sites on the web. it emphasizes genuine friendships and the discovery of new people through friends.