Twitter as a scalability case study

A lot has been said already about Twitter's scalability issues. Many have given Twitter as an anti-pattern of how not to deal with scalability and have suggested different solutions for scaling it. As Twitter is famously a Ruby-on-Rails deployment, this case has also been used as a weapon in the language/platform wars between the RoR and Java camps, and to a lesser degree, also with the LAMP (PHP) camp

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Put the web server on a diet and increase scalability

Misusing HTTP sessions is probably the number one obstacle to building scalable web sites today. Here are some tips how to consume HTTP sessions responsibly.

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Google App Engine - what about existing applications?

Recently, Google announced Google App Engine, another announcement in the rapidly growing world of cloud computing. This brings up some very serious questions: 1. If we want to take advantage of one of the clouds, are we doomed to be locked-in for life? 2. Must we re-write our existing applications to use the cloud? 3. Do we need to learn a brand new technology or language for the cloud? This post presents a pattern that will enable us to abstract our application code from the underlying cloud provider infrastructure. This will enable us to easily migrate our EXISTING applications to cloud based environment thus avoiding the need for a complete re-write.

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Lazy web sites run faster

It is fairly obvious that web site performance can be increased by making the code run faster and optimising the response time. But that only scales up to a point. To really take our web sites to the next level, we need to look at the performance problem from a different angle.

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Scaling Out MySQL

This post covers two main options for scaling-out MySql and compare between them. The first is based on data-base clustering and the second is based on In Memory clustering a.k.a Data Grid. A special emphasis is given to a pattern which shows how to scale our existing data base without changing it through a combination of Data Grid and data base as a background service. This pattern is referred to as Persistency as a Service (PaaS). It also address many of the fequently asked question related to how performance, reliability and scalability is achieved with this pattern.

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Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Web Site

The Exceptional Performance group at Yahoo! has identified 14 best practices for making web pages faster. These best practices have proven to reduce response times of Yahoo! properties by 25-50%. They focus on the front-end, for example, why it's bad to use "@import" for including stylesheets and why ETags disable browser caching. This google tech talk features these best practices and demonstrate YSlow. Relevant links: 14 Rules for Exceptional Web Performance: http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html YSlow: http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/ Check out the book for details: High Performance Web Sites: Essential Knowledge for Front-End Engineers

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The AOL XMPP scalability challenge

Large scale distributed instant messaging, presence based protocol are a real challenge. With big players adopting the standard, the XMPP (eXtensible Messaging and Presence Protocol) community is facing the need to validate protocol and implementations to even larger scale.

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OpenSpaces.org community site launched - framework for building scale-out applications

GigaSpaces launched OpenSpaces.org, a community web site for developers who wish to utilize and contribute to the open source OpenSpaces development framework. OpenSpaces extends the Spring Framework for enterprise Java development, and leverages the GigaSpaces eXtreme Application Platform (XAP) for data caching, messaging and as the container for application business logic. It is designed for building highly-available, scale-out applications in distributed environments, such as SOA, cloud computing, grids and commodity servers. OpenSpaces is widely used in a variety of industries, including financial services, telecommunications, manufacturing and retail -- and across the web in e-commerce, Web 2.0 applications such as social networking sites, search and more. OpenSpaces.org already lists more than two dozen projects submitted by the developer community, including GigaSpaces customers, partners and employees. Innovative projects include an instant messaging platform, integration with PHP, configuration via JRuby, an implementation of Spring Batch and a scalable dynamic RSS feed delivery system. GigaSpaces recently announced the OpenSpaces Developer Challenge, a developer competition with $25,000 in total prizes and a $10,000 grand prize. The prizes will be awarded to the most innovative applications built using the OpenSpaces framework or plug-ins that extend it. The Challenge deadline is April 2, 2008 and ‘early bird’ prizes are available for those who submit their concepts by February 13, 2008. Additionally, in November of 2007 GigaSpaces launched its Start-Up Program, which provides free software licenses for qualifying individuals and companies.

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Future of EJB3 !! ??

What is the future of EJB3 in the industry , given the current trends ? There are a lot of arguments regarding EJB3 being heavy weighted ..... Also, what could be the alternatives of EJB3 ? How about the scalability, persistence, performance and other factors ?

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Lessons from Yahoo, eBay, Orbitz, LinkedIn architecture

In The Architectures You've Always Wondered About track at the Qcon conference, Second Life, eBay, Yahoo, LinkedIn and Orbitz presented how they dealt with different aspects of their applications, such as scalability. There were quite a few lessons that I learned that day that I thought were worth sharing. The details are provided below: Lessons from Yahoo, eBay, Orbitz, LinkedIn architecture

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