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Adrian Singer has boiled down 7 years of experience to a set of 10 very useful tips on how to best optimize NGINX and PHP-fpm for high traffic sites: 1. Switch from TCP to UNIX domain sockets. When communicating to processes on the same machine UNIX sockets have better performance
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Ever come to a point where you feel you've learned enough to share your experiences in the hopes of helping others traveling the same road? That's what Martin Kleppmann has done in an lovingly written Six things I wish we had known about scaling, an article
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Matthew Might, as a first responder to a surprise traffic surge on his inexpensive linode hosted blog, took emergency steps that you might find useful in a similar situation: 1. Find the bottleneck. Reloading the page in firebug showed the first page took 24 seconds to load and after that
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Inspired by a xkcd comic, Peter Norvig, Director of Research at Google and all around interesting and nice guy, has created an above par code kata involving a regex program that demonstrates the core inner loop of many successful systems profiled on HighScalability. The original code is at xkcd 1313:
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HackerEarth is a coding skill practice and testing service that in a series of well written articles describes the trials and tribulations of building their site and how they overcame them: Scaling Python/Django application with Apache and mod_wsgi, Programming challenges, uptime, and mistakes in 2013, Post-mortem: The big
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Monitor, monitor, monitor. That's the advice every startup gives once they reach a certain size. But can you ever monitor enough? If you are Bitly and everyone will complain when you are down, probably not. Here are 10 Things We Forgot to Monitor from Bitly, along with good
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Netty is a high-performance NIO (New IO) client server framework for Java that Twitter uses internally as a protocol agonostic RPC system. Twitter found some problems with Netty 3's memory management for buffer allocations beacause it generated a lot of garbage during operation. When you send as many
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Tom Preston-Werner, GitHub Cofounder, wrote Ten Lessons from GitHub’s First Year in 2008. Though the lessons are still relevant, and the war stories behind each lesson are great, I can't help but wonder what a 2013 version would look like? 1. Start Early - GitHub created a
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Jonathan Block, CTO at RockThePost.com, a crowdfunding company, has written a nice set of tips for smaller sites on how to scale a service on EC2 using a small two person development team. Their service has a typical small scale structure: * PHP's Zend Framework 2 * Two m1.
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You know your product is doing well when most of your early blog posts deal with the status of the waiting list of hundreds of thousands of users eagerly waiting to download your product. That's the enviable position Mailbox, a free mobile email management app, found themselves early
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"Everything in war is simple, but the simplest thing is difficult." -- Carl von Clausewitz Games are proving grounds for software architecture. They combine scale, high performance, challenging problems, a rabid user base, cost sensitivity, and the need for profit. And when games have in-game currency, like EVE
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With cloud SLAs generally being worth what you don't pay for them, what can you do to protect yourself? Sean Hull in AirBNB didn’t have to fail has some solid advice on how to deal with outages: 1. Use Redundancy. Make database and webserver tiers redundant using