Strategy
In Client Side Load Balancing for Web 2.0 Applications author Lei Zhu suggests a very interesting approach to load balancing: forget DNS round robbin, toss your expensive load balancer, and make your client do the load balancing for you. Your client maintains a list of possible servers and cycles
CDN
If you have a lot of static content to store and you aren't looking forward to setting up and maintaining your own giganto SAN, maybe you can push off a lot of the hard lifting to a CDN? Jesse Robbins at O'Reilly Radar posts that you
Strategy
In March, 2000, I did a talk about how we scaled with semi-static files while splitting data from presentation. For dynamic pages we used mod_perl doing an internal redirect with the XML on the style templates. Since then Apache 2.0 contains the concept of filters to allow for
Strategy
Another scalability strategy brought to you by Erik Osterman: Just thought I'd drop a brief suggestion to anyone building a large mail system. Our solution for scaling mail pickup was to develop a sharded architecture whereby accounts are spread across a cluster of servers, each with imap/pop3
Strategy
This JoelOnSoftware thread asks the age old question of what and how to log. The usual trace/error/warning/info advice is totally useless in a large scale distributed system. Instead, you need to log everything all the time so you can solve problems that have already happened across a
Strategy
Amazingly TechCrunch runs their website on one web server and one database server, according to the fascinating survey What the Web’s most popular sites are running on by Pingdom, a provider of uptime and response time monitoring. Early we learned PlentyOfFish catches and releases many millions of hits a
Strategy
Alan Watts once observed how after we accepted Descartes' separation of the mind and body we've been trying to smash them back together again ever since when really they were never separate to begin with. The database normalization-denormalization dualism has the same mobius shaped reverberations as Descartes&
CDN
Playing like the big boys may be getting cheaper. The big boys, like YouTube, farm the serving of their most popular videos to a third party CDN. A lot of people were surprised YouTube didn't serve all their content themselves, but it makes sense. It allows them to
Strategy
This scalability strategy is brought to you by Erik Osterman: My recommendations for anyone dealing with explosive growth on a limited budget with lots of cachable content (e.g. content capable of returning valid expiration headers) is employ a reverse proxy as mentioned in this article. In the last week,
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.