Example
Slashdot effect: overwhelming unprepared sites with an avalanche of reader's clicks after being mentioned on Slashdot. Sure, we now have the "Digg effect" and other hot new stars, but Slashdot was the original. And like many stars from generations past, Slashdot plays the elder statesman'
Paper
One stumbling block of the the great march towards virtualization is the relatively poor performance of resource hungry applications like databases. We are told to develop and test using VMs, but deploy without them. Which kind of sucks IMHO. Maybe better virtualization technology can remove this split. This paper talks
Product
If you are trying to create highly available file systems, especially across data centers, then ChironFS is one potential solution. It's relatively new, so there aren't lots of experience reports, but it looks worth considering. What is ChironFS and how does it work? Adapted from the
Strategy
All the cool kids advocate scaling out as the secret sauce of scaling. And it is, but don't forget to serve some tasty "scaling up" as a side dish. Scaling up doesn't have to mean buying a jet propelled, liquid cooled, 128 core monster
Monitoring
WordPress.com hosts 300 servers in 5 different data centers. It's always useful to learn how large installations manage all their unruly children: Currently we Nagios for server health monitoring, Munin for graphing various server metrics, and a wiki to keep track of all the server hardware specs,
Java
Update 2: Read/WriteWeb has a good article talking about the scalability issues of relational databases and how Dynamo solves them: Amazon Dynamo: The Next Generation Of Virtual Distributed Storage. But since Dynamo is just another frustrating walled garden protected by barbed wire and guard dogs, its relevance is somewhat
Example
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
Sam Madden in the The Database Column blog covers some database architectures. Quick summary: Shared-memory systems don't scale well as the shared bus becomes the bottleneck Shared-disk systems don't scale well either Shared-nothing scales the best
Example
Mark Maunder of No VC Required--who advocates not taking VC money lest you be turned into a frog instead of the prince (or princess) you were dreaming of--has an excellent slide deck on how to scale an early stage startup. His blog also has some good SEO tips and a
automattic
Automattic recently purchase Gravatar and have switched the server onto their hosting platform. WordPress.com host over 1.7 million blogs with well over 60'000 new posts submitted each day generating 10 - 12 million page views per day. Barry on WordPress.com has a great post on
Example
Wikipedia and Wikimedia have some of the best, most complete real-world documentation on how to build highly scalable systems. This paper by Domas Mituzas covers a lot of details about how Wikipedia works, including: an overview of the different packages used (Linux, PowerDNS, LVS, Squid, lighttpd, Apache, PHP5, Lucene, Mono,
Strategy
Jesse Robbins at O'Reily Radar has a nice post on how spending a little up front time on figuring out how to scale your operations process saves money on ops people and allows you to save time adding and upgrading servers. Adding, monitoring, and upgrading servers can get