High Scalability Building bigger, faster, more reliable websites.

Lukas Biewald shares a fascinating slam by slam recount of how his FaceStat (upload your picture and be judged by the masses) site was battered by a link on Yahoo's main page that caused an almost instantaneous 650,000 page view jump on their site. Yahoo spends considerable effort making sure its own properties can handle the truly massive flow from the main page. Turning the Great Eye of the Internet towards an unsuspecting newborn site must be quite the diaper ready experience. Theo Schlossnagle eerily prophesized about such events in The Implications of Punctuated Scalabilium for Website Architecture: massive, unexpected and sudden traffic spikes will become more common as a fickle internet seeks ever for new entertainments (my summary). Exactly FaceStat's situation.

This is also one of our first exposures to an application written on Merb, a popular Ruby on Rails competitor. For those who think Ruby is the problem, their architecture now serves 100 times the original load.

How did our fine FaceStat fellowship fair against Yahoo’s onslaught?

Om proposes one solution to the Twitter Problem is to limit followers to three square meals a day. The reasonable idea being that lower limits should mean fewer scaling problems. And as a kicker raising those limits is a good way to raise much needed revenue.

Scoble thinks users should consume without limit and will drive to another buffet if all-you-can-eat privileges are revoked. The reasonable idea being that if an internet service can't solve internet scale problems then there's not much use for it.

Dave says comp power users a top floor suite and shower them with free passes to the buffet. Let the good times roll! The reasonable idea being that power users help create popular restaurants, er, services in the first place and limiting them starves users and starved users won't come back.

So, should web services like Twitter be a buffet, a fixed eight course fine dining experience, a small plate restaurant, a family style joint, or a vending machine? Or something else entirely?

In a distant barely remembered past I actually worked at an all-you-can-eat buffet. The food was very good and most customers didn't over over indulge. If they did the place wouldn't stay in business long. But some customers did. They were called stackers.

Stackers were so named because a large stack of plates would pile up on their table throughout the meal. Stackers followed a power law distribution. Few customers at any one time were stackers, but their effect could be devastating. How devastating depended on their favorite foods...

Theo Schlossnagle, with his usual insight, talks about in Dissecting today's surges how the nature of internet traffic has evolved over time. Traffic now spikes like a heart attack, larger and more quickly than ever from traffic inflow sources like Digg and The New York Times. Theo relates how At least eight times in the past month, we've experienced from 100% to 1000% sudden increases in traffic across many of our clients and those spike can happen as quickly as 60 seconds. To me this sounds a lot like Punctuated equilibrium in evolution, a force that accounts for much creative growth in species...