Thursday, September 13, 2007 at 8:45AM Hi there, what do you think is crucial in the code designing of a scalable site? How does one prepare for webfarms and clusters (e.g. in PHP)? Thanks, Stephan
Wednesday, September 12, 2007 at 5:36AM Anyone knows what's behind this service? http://www.mediatemple.net/webhosting/gs/ thanks!
Monday, September 10, 2007 at 5:27AM Royans' scalability blog and his main blog are excellent sources of scalability information. Take a look.
Monday, September 10, 2007 at 5:19AM Theo Schlossnagle is the author of Scalable Internet Architecture and the funder of OmniTI , a global leader in Internet technology services that power the World Wide Web and email. As you might imagine Theo frequently posts on interesting topics for the scalable website builder.
Monday, September 10, 2007 at 1:40AM Unlike Theo Schlossnagle, author of Scalable Internet Architectures, I am not a stickler for semantics because I have an unswerving faith in the ultimate unknowability of the world as experienced by others. That's why it is Theo who bravely tackles the differences in his informative blog post Partitioning vs. Federation vs. Sharding. Royans Tharakan also talks about it on his blog. Is there a difference and does it really matter to all our intrepid scalable website builders? Generally whatever Theo says is probably close to the truth. Yet, in my mind I think of partitioning as a basic level category and federation and sharding as more specific (subordinate) instances of partitioning. And partitioning is a more specific instance of the more more general (superordinate) category divide-and-conquer. Which isn't a useful way to think about the topic at all. So, let's say federation is like Star Trek. The Vulcans, Klingons, and Humans live in very separate policy domains, but they each pledge to work together to make sure Captain Kirk always gets the girl. And sharding is like AJAX, a great marketing term for stuff that may have already existed, but has taken on a new useful life on its own. And that new useful life is that there are very specific examples of how sharding works, how it has been successful for existing web sites, and how you can create your scalable web site use shards. Federation and partitioning are far more nebulous less pragmatic concepts, so I am more than happy to AJAXify sharding into the popular lexicon :-) Related Articles:
Sunday, September 9, 2007 at 3:12PM Hi, I'm interested in peoples thoughts on the best choice for a database clustering solution. I have a database that is mostly varchars and numbers that doesn't store any binary data at all. It's used at about 70% read and 30% writes - though we're using memcached at the moment so it's not really hit that hard. We're currently using mysql with m/cluster, but are interested in a new solution. Possible candidate so far are unicluster (which doesn't seem mature yet.) or DRBD. Had anyone had a similar experience and can make any suggestions? Thanks
Saturday, September 8, 2007 at 6:01PM This presentation by Michael Radwin describes why Yahoo! had standardized on PHP going forward. It describes how after reviewing all the web technologies including their own internal ones, PHP was choosen. It shows that not only technical reasons , but also business and development processes were taken into account.
Saturday, September 8, 2007 at 4:13AM 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 similar functionality.
Friday, September 7, 2007 at 10:42PM Colm MacCarthaigh, Network Architect at Joost, gave this presentation at the UK Network Operators' Forum Meeting in Manchester on April 3rd, 2007.
