Strategy
Release It! author Michael Nygard tells a tale of two web sites, both brought low by unexpectedly huge unbounded results sets that slowed down their sites to the speed of a Christmas checkout line. I've committed this error more than a few times. During testing the results sets
Strategy
This is a question asked on the ycombinator list and there are some good responses. I gave a quick response, but I particularly like neilk's knock out of the park insightful answer: Read Cal Henderson's book. (I'd add in Theo's book and
Strategy
A lot of apps need to map IP addresses to locations. Jeremy Cole in On efficiently geo-referencing IPs with MaxMind GeoIP and MySQL GIS succinctly explains the many uses for such a feature: Geo-referencing IPs is, in a nutshell, converting an IP address, perhaps from an incoming web visitor, a
Strategy
Now that the internet has become defined as a mashup over a collection of service APIs, we have a little problem: for clients using APIs is a lot like drinking beer through a straw. You never get as much beer as you want and you get a headache after. But
Strategy
Bees have a similar problem to website servers: how to do a lot of work with limited resources in an ever changing environment. Usually lessons from biology are hard to apply to computer problems. Nature throws hardware at problems. Billions and billions of cells cooperate at different levels of organizations
Strategy
Michael Nygard talks about Two Ways To Boost Your Flagging Web Site. The idea behind cache farms is to move memory devoted to the various caching layers into one large farm of caches, as with memcached. The idea behind read pools is to allocate your database read requests to a
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
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
Strategy
One of the premier scaling strategies is always: get someone else to do the work for you. But unlike Huckleberry Finn in Tom Sawyer, you won't have to trick anyone into whitewashing a fence for you. Times have changed. Companies like Ning, Facebook, and Salesforce are more than
Strategy
Robert Stewart shared this useful Ajax related scalability strategy: We avoided XMLHttpRequests for individual keystrokes, choosing to go back to the server only when a field lost focus. Google can afford all the servers to handle the load for that, but we didn't want to. Do you have
Product
Complex applications coordinating work across a lot of machines often need a highly performing fault tolerant message layer. Though a blast to write, it's probably a better use of your time to use an off the shelf solution. And that's where Spread comes in. Flickr, for
Strategy
Colin Charles has cool picture showing Flickr's message telling him they'll need about 15 minutes to move his 11,500 images to another shard. One, that's a lot of pictures! Two, it just goes to show you don't have to make this