Tuesday, November 13, 2007 at 6:04PM Update: Flickr hits 2 Billion photos served. That's a lot of hamburgers.
Flickr is both my favorite bird and the web's leading photo sharing site. Flickr has an amazing challenge, they must handle a vast sea of ever expanding new content, ever increasing legions of users, and a constant stream of new features, all while providing excellent performance. How do they do it?
Site: http://www.flickr.com
Monday, November 12, 2007 at 3:13AM Slashdot effect: overwhelming unprepared sites with an avalanche of reader's clicks after being mentioned on Slashdot. Sure, we now have the "Digg effect" and other hot new stars, but Slashdot was the original. And like many stars from generations past, Slashdot plays the elder statesman's role with with class, dignity, and restraint. Yet with millions and millions of users Slashdot is still box office gold and more than keeps up with the young'ins. And with age comes the wisdom of learning how to handle all those users. Just how does Slashdot scale and what can you learn by going old school? Site: http://slashdot.org
Tuesday, October 30, 2007 at 3:15PM A man had a dream. His dream was to blend a bunch of RSS/Atom/RDF feeds into a single feed. The man is Beau Lebens of Feedville and like most dreamers he was a little short on coin. So he took refuge in the home of a cheap hosting provider and Beau realized his dream, creating FEEDblendr. But FEEDblendr chewed up so much CPU creating blended feeds that the cheap hosting provider ordered Beau to find another home. Where was Beau to go? He eventually found a new home in the virtual machine room of Amazon's EC2. This is the story of how Beau was finally able to create his one feeds safe within the cradle of affordable CPU cycles. Site: http://feedblendr.com/
Sunday, October 28, 2007 at 2:26PM Mark Maunder of No VC Required--who advocates not taking VC money lest you be turned into a frog instead of the prince (or princess) you were dreaming of--has an excellent slide deck on how to scale an early stage startup. His blog also has some good SEO tips and a very spooky widget showing the geographical location of his readers. Perfect for Halloween! What is Mark's other worldly scaling strategies for startups? Site: http://novcrequired.com/
Friday, October 26, 2007 at 7:54AM Wikipedia and Wikimedia have some of the best, most complete real-world documentation on how to build highly scalable systems. This paper by Domas Mituzas covers a lot of details about how Wikipedia works, including: an overview of the different packages used (Linux, PowerDNS, LVS, Squid, lighttpd, Apache, PHP5, Lucene, Mono, Memcached), how they use their CDN, how caching works, how they profile their code, how they store their media, how they structure their database access, how they handle search, how they handle load balancing and administration. All with real code examples and examples of configuration files. This is a really useful resource.
Monday, October 8, 2007 at 10:35AM Pownce is a new social messaging application competing micromessage to micromessage with the likes of Twitter and Jaiku. Still in closed beta, Pownce has generously shared some of what they've learned so far. Like going to a barrel tasting of a young wine and then tasting the same wine after some aging, I think what will be really interesting is to follow Pownce and compare the Pownce of today with the Pownce of tomorrow, after a few years spent in the barrel. What lessons lie in wait for Pownce as they grow? Site: http://www.pownce.com/
Tuesday, October 2, 2007 at 12:08AM Fotolog, a social blogging site centered around photos, grew from about 300 thousand users in 2004 to over 11 million users in 2007. Though they initially experienced the inevitable pains of rapid growth, they overcame their problems and now manage over 300 million photos and 800,000 new photos are added each day. Generating all that fabulous content are 20 million unique monthly visitors and a volunteer army of 30,000 new users each day. They did so well a very impressed suitor bought them out for a cool $90 million. That's scale meets success by anyone standards. How did they do it? Site: http://www.fotolog.com/
I have a new memcached user to add to your list: we here at Fotolog, the world's largest photo blogging community, now use it and we love it. I just rolled our first code to use it into production today and it has been a lifesaver. I can't wait to start using it in places where we had been relying on Berkeley databases to offload some database work. We are not some wimpy million page a day site, either. Fotolog is a billion+ pages/month site (35 to 40 million views/day is pretty typical for us). We had recently overcome some significant DB-related performance issues which allowed our site traffic to explode, and it started to bog down again under the heavy traffic load (getting back up towards 10 seconds for a page to load sometimes during the peak periods). The servers were churning away each recreating a list every time when it could easily be shared in the same form for at least 5 or 10 minutes. So we introduced memcache, creating a distributed 30-server cluster with 4 gigs available in total and made a very minor code mod to use memcache, and our peak period load times dropped back down to the 2 second or so range. It has allowed for continued growth and incredible efficiency. I can't say when I've ever been so pleased with something that worked so simply."
Tuesday, September 18, 2007 at 5:44AM This is a wonderfully informative Amazon update based on Joachim Rohde's discovery of an interview with Amazon's CTO. You'll learn about how Amazon organizes their teams around services, the CAP theorem of building scalable systems, how they deploy software, and a lot more. Many new additions from the ACM Queue article have also been included. Amazon grew from a tiny online bookstore to one of the largest stores on earth. They did it while pioneering new and interesting ways to rate, review, and recommend products. Greg Linden shared is version of Amazon's birth pangs in a series of blog articles Site: http://amazon.com
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.
Wednesday, August 22, 2007 at 9:56AM Wikimedia is the platform on which Wikipedia, Wiktionary, and the other seven wiki dwarfs are built on. This document is just excellent for the student trying to scale the heights of giant websites. It is full of details and innovative ideas that have been proven on some of the most used websites on the internet. Site: http://wikimedia.org/
