Paper
I found the discussion of the available bandwidth of tree vs higher dimensional virtual networks topologies quite, to quote Spock, fascinating: A mathematical analysis by Ritter (2002) (one of the original developers of Napster) presented a detailed numerical argument demonstrating that the Gnutella network could not scale to the capacity
Product
ScaleOut StateServer is an in-memory distributed cache across a server farm or compute grid. Unlike middleware vendors, StateServer is aims at being a very good data cache, it doesn't try to handle job scheduling as well. StateServer is what you might get when you take Memcached and merge
Paper
Looks interesting... Abstract: Today’s data centers may contain tens of thousands of computers with significant aggregate bandwidth requirements. The network architecture typically consists of a tree of routing and switching elements with progressively more specialized and expensive equipment moving up the network hierarchy. Unfortunately, even when deploying the highest-end
Strategy
Update 2: Michael Galpin in Cache Money and Cache Discussions likes memcached for it's expiry policy, complex graph data, process data, but says MySQL has many advantages: SQL, Uniform Data Access, Write-through, Read-through, Replication, Management, Cold starts, LRU eviction. Update: Dormando asks Should you use memcached? Should you
Strategy
Pre-generating static files is an oldy but a goody, and as Thomas Brox Røst says, it's probably an underused strategy today. At one time this was the dominate technique for structuring a web site. Then the age of dynamic web sites arrived and we spent all our time
Java
Update:Evaluating Terracotta by Piotr Woloszyn. Nice writeup that covers resilience, failover, DB persistence, Distributed caching implementation, OS/Platform restrictions, Ease of implementation, Hardware requirements, Performance, Support package, Code stability, partitioning, Transactional, Replication and consistency. Terracotta is Network Attached Memory (NAM) for Java VMs. It provides up to a terabyte
Strategy
One of the most popular and effective scalability strategies is to impose limits (GAE Quotas, Fotolog, Facebook) as a means of protecting a website against service destroying traffic spikes. Twitter will reportedly limit the number followers to 2,000 in order to thwart follow spam. This may also allow Twitter
A couple of videos about distributed computing with direct reference on Google infrastructure. You will get acquainted with: --MapReduce the software framework implemented by Google to support parallel computations over large (greater than 100 terabyte) data sets on commodity hardware --GFS and the way it stores it's data
Strategy
The primero recommendation for speeding up a website is almost always to add cache and more cache. And after that add a little more cache just in case. Memcached is almost always given as the recommended cache to use. What we don't often hear is how to effectively
Product
Ehcache is a pure Java cache with the following features: fast, simple, small foot print, minimal dependencies, provides memory and disk stores for scalability into gigabytes, scalable to hundreds of caches is a pluggable cache for Hibernate, tuned for high concurrent load on large multi-cpu servers, provides LRU, LFU and
hibernate
Update: A very nice JavaWorld podcast interview with Google engineer Max Ross on Hibernate Shards. Max defines Hibernate Shards (horizontal partitioning), how it works (pretty well), virtual shards (don't ask), what they need to do in the future (query, replication, operational tools), and how it relates to Google
Paper
This is an unusually well written and useful paper. It talks in detail about experiences implementing a complex project, something we don't see very often. They shockingly even admit that creating a working implementation of Paxos was more difficult than just translating the pseudo code. Imagine that, programmers