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How do you scale a viral Facebook app that has skyrocketed to a mind boggling 65 million installs (the population of France)? That's the fortunate problem BuddyPoke co-founder Dave Westwood has and he talked about his solution at Wednesday's Facebook Meetup. Slides for the complete talk
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You don't even have to make a bid, Randy Shoup, an eBay Distinguished Architect, gives this presentation on how eBay scales, for free. Randy has done a fabulous job in this presentation and in other talks listed at the end of this post getting at the heart of
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Real-time social graphs (connectivity between people, places, and things). That's why scaling Facebook is hard says Jeff Rothschild, Vice President of Technology at Facebook. Social networking sites like Facebook, Digg, and Twitter are simply harder than traditional websites to scale. Why is that? Why would social networking sites
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Tim Bray has a wonderful interview with Casey Forbes, creator of Ravelry, a Ruby on Rails site supporting a 400,000+ strong community of dedicated knitters and crocheters. Casey and his small team have done great things with Ravelry. It is a very focused site that provides a lot of
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I first heard an enthusiastic endorsement of Squarespace streaming from the ubiquitous Leo Laporte on one of his many Twit Live shows. Squarespace as a fully hosted, completely managed environment for creating and maintaining a website, blog or portfolio was of interest to me because they promise scalability and this
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Update: Streamy Explains CAP and HBase's Approach to CAP. We plan to employ inter-cluster replication, with each cluster located in a single DC. Remote replication will introduce some eventual consistency into the system, but each cluster will continue to be strongly consistent. Ryan Barrett, Google App Engine datastore
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ThePort Network's Director of Engineering, TJ Muehleman was kind of enough to share some of the architectural details for their white label social media system. It currently runs about 50 social networks varying in size from less than 1000 members to more than 300,000 members, all on
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Update 2: Elastic Load Balancer and EC2 instance bandwidth. It turns out we are limited by bandwidth and not by CPU. Solution: use DNS Round Robin for two to three HighCPU medium instances. Update: The Skinny Straw: Cloud Computing's Bottleneck and How to Address It. For cloud computing,
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Update 4: Why you don’t want to shard. by Morgon on the MySQL Performance Blog. Optimize everything else first, and then if performance still isn’t good enough, it’s time to take a very bitter medicine. Update 3: Building Scalable Databases: Pros and Cons of Various Database Sharding
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Update 2: Stack Overflow Architecture Update - Now At 95 Million Page Views A Month Update: Startup – ASP.NET MVC, Cloud Scale & Deployment shows an interesting alternative approach for a Windows stack using ServerPath/GoGrid for a dedicated database machine, elastic VMs for the front end, and a free
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Update 7: Basecamp, now with more vroom. Basecamp application servers running Ruby code were upgraded and virtualization was removed. The result: A 66 % reduction in the response time while handling multiples of the traffic is beyond what I expected. They still use virtualization (Linux KVM), just less of it now.
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Update 6: Some interesting changes from Twitter's Evan Weaver: everything in RAM now, database is a backup; peaks at 300 tweets/second; every tweet followed by average 126 people; vector cache of tweet IDs; row cache; fragment cache; page cache; keep separate caches; GC makes Ruby optimization resistant