Habits of Highly Scalable Web Applications

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 the trip you'll visit:

What is scalable application design

Tip 1: load balancing the webserver

Tip 2: scaling from a single DB server to a Master-Slave setup

Tip 3: Partitioning, Vertical DB Scaling

Tip 4: Partitioning, horizontal DB Scaling

Tip 5: Application Level Partitioning

Tip 6: Caching to get around your database

Resources

Comments

[Cuong]

These are good general tips. I'd add another:

Tip 7: Profiling tools

In any sufficiently high-traffic system, the bottlenecks are not always clear or are continuously shifting based on traffic or changes in user behavior. You will likely need multiple tools for understanding where your application is spending most of its time, so that you know where to spend your engineering time.