Tuesday
Sep232008
How to Scale with Ruby on Rails
Tuesday, September 23, 2008 at 5:32AM
By George Palmer of 3dogsbark.com. Covers:
* How you start out: shared hosting, web server DB on same machine. Move two 2 machines. Minimal code changes.
* Scaling the database. Add read slaves on their own machines. Then master-master setup. Still minimal code changes.
* Scaling the web server. Load balance against multiple application servers. Application servers scale but the database doesn't.
* User clusters. Partition and allocate users to their own dedicated cluster. Requires substantial code changes.
* Caching. A large percentage of hits are read only. Use reverse proxy, memcached, and language specific cache.
* Elastic architectures. Based on Amazon EC2. Start and stop instances on demand. For global applications keep a cache on each continent, assign users to clusters by location, maintain app servers on each continent, use transaction replication software if you must replicate your site globally.
* How you start out: shared hosting, web server DB on same machine. Move two 2 machines. Minimal code changes.
* Scaling the database. Add read slaves on their own machines. Then master-master setup. Still minimal code changes.
* Scaling the web server. Load balance against multiple application servers. Application servers scale but the database doesn't.
* User clusters. Partition and allocate users to their own dedicated cluster. Requires substantial code changes.
* Caching. A large percentage of hits are read only. Use reverse proxy, memcached, and language specific cache.
* Elastic architectures. Based on Amazon EC2. Start and stop instances on demand. For global applications keep a cache on each continent, assign users to clusters by location, maintain app servers on each continent, use transaction replication software if you must replicate your site globally.
Reader Comments (1)
Just an FYI that none of these tips are specific to PHP. You could replace 'Ruby on Rails' with just about any language and the points would be the same.