Product
Lighttpd (pronounced "lighty") is a web server which is designed to be secure, fast, standards-compliant, and flexible while being optimized for speed-critical environments. Its low memory footprint (compared to other web servers), light CPU load and its speed goals make lighttpd suitable for servers that are suffering load
Strategy
This paper is a great overview of different lightweight web servers. A lot of websites use lightweight web servers to serve images and static content. YouTube is one example: YouTube Architecture. So if you need to improve performance consider changing over a different web server for some types of content.
Failure Analysis
A lot of sites hosted in San Francisco are down because of at least 6 back-to-back power outages power outages. More details at laughingsquid. Sites like SecondLife, Craigstlist, Technorati, Yelp and all Six Apart properties, TypePad, LiveJournal and Vox are all down. The cause was an underground explosion in a
Product
If you want to adopt a shard architecture, but don't want to start from scratch, you may want to consider Hibernate's sharding system. Hibernate Shards is a framework that is designed to encapsulate and minimize this complexity by adding support for horizontal partitioning to Hibernate Core.
Example
Google Talk is Google's instant communications service. Interestingly the IM messages aren't the major architectural challenge, handling user presence indications dominate the design. They also have the challenge of handling small low latency messages and integrating with many other systems. How do they do it? Site:
template
Site: Information Sources Platform What's Inside? The Stats The Architecture * Data Center. * Storage. * Development Environment. * OS. * Web Server. * Database. * Database abstraction layer. * Load balancing. * Web Framework. * Real-time messaging. * Identity management. * Distributed job management. * Ad serving. * Standard API to website. * AJAX library. * PHP Cache. * Object and Content Cache. * Client
Information Sources Platform What's Inside? The Stats Lessons Learned To discuss this article please visit the forums at
MySQL
As users come to depend on MySQL, they find that they have to deal with issues of reliability, scalability, and performance--issues that are not well documented but are critical to a smoothly functioning site. This book is an insider's guide to these little understood topics. Author Jeremy Zawodny
MySQL
Guide to Cost-effective Database Scale-Out using MySQL by MySQL This paper is behind a registration-wall, you can't do anything on the MySQL site without filling out a form of some kind, but it's a short, decent introduction to using MySQL for a good sized website. A
MySQL
MySQL Scale-Out by application partitioning by Oli Sennhauser Eventually every database system hit its limits. Especially on the Internet, where you have millions of users which theoretically access your database simultaneously, eventually your IO system will be a bottleneck. [A] promising but more complex solution with nearly no scale-out limits
Clustered Storage System
The Clustered Storage Revolution If the clustered file system, clustered storage system, storage virtualization movement is new to you then this is a good intro paper. It's a both vendor puff piece and informative, so it might be worth your time. A Quick Hit of What's
MySQL
Follow this blog and you'll learn a lot about MySQL and how to make it sing. A Quick Hit of What's Inside Working with large data sets in MySQL, PHP Large result sets and summary tables, Implementing efficient counters with MySQL. Site: http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/