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Update: Offloading ALL JS Files To Google. Now you can let Google serve all your javascript files. This article tells you how to do it (upload to Google Code Project) and why it's a big win (cheap, fast, caching, parallel downloads, save bandwidth). Don't have a
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Virtualization offers a lot of benefits, but it also comes with a cost (memory, CPU, network, IO, licensing). If you are in or running a cloud then some form of virtualization may not even be an option. But if you are running your own string of servers you can choose
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This post on www.ilovebonnie.net documents some impressive system performance improvements by the addition of Squid Cache (a caching proxy) and APC Cache (opcode cache for PHP). * Apache is able to deliver roughly 700% more requests per second with Squid when serving 1KB and 100KB images. * Server load is
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Update 8: The Cost of Latency by James Hamilton. James summarizing some latency info from Steve Souder, Greg Linden, and Marissa Mayer. Speed [is] an undervalued and under-discussed asset on the web. Update 7: How do you know when you need more memcache servers?. Dathan Pattishall talks about using memcache
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You might think major Internet companies have a latency, availability, and bandwidth advantage because they can afford expensive dedicated point-to-point private line networks between their data centers. And you would be right. It's a great advantage. Or it at least it was a great advantage. Cost is the
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Nick Belhomme wrote up a excellent summary of a talk given by Eli White on building scalable web applications. Eli worked at digg.com and is now the PHP Community Manager & DevZone Editor-in-Chief at Zend Technologies. Eli takes us on a grand tour through various proven scaling strategies. On
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InfoQueue has this excellent talk by Brian Goetz on the new features being added to Java SE 7 that will allow programmers to fully exploit our massively multi-processor future. While the talk is about Java it's really more general than that and there's a lot to
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Wille Faler has created an excellent list of best practices for building scalable and high performance systems. Here's a short summary of his points: Offload the database - Avoid hitting the database, and avoid opening transactions or connections unless you absolutely need to use them. What a difference
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Update 6: CARS = Cost Aware Runtimes and Services by William Louth. Update 5: Damn You Google, Damn You Yahoo! Why D'Ya Do This to Us? Free accounts on a cloud platform are a constant drain of money. Update 4: Caching becomes even more important in CPU based billing
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Update 2: Linear Bloom Filters by Edward Kmett. A Bloom filter is a novel data structure for approximating membership in a set. A Bloom join conserves network bandwith by exchanging cheaper, more plentiful local CPU utilization and disk IO. Update: What are Amazon EC2 Compute Units?. Cloud providers charge for
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Garry Tan, cofounder of Posterous, lists 12 lessons for scaling that apply to more than just Rails. Use cloud storage for static files. Use HTTP Cache Control to tell the browser what it can cache. Use Sphinx for text search. Use InnoDB for more crash resistant and faster writes. Don&
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Moshe Kaplan of RockeTier shows the life cycle of an affiliate marketing system that starts off as a cub handling one million events per day and ends up a lion handling 200 million to even one billion events per day. The resulting system uses ten commodity servers at a cost