Starting a website from scratch - what technologies should I use?

Hi, if you were to design your own highly scalable website from scratch, what technologies would you use? Based on Web 2.0 popularity, LAMP seems to be high in the running. But would you tack on CakePHP? Drupal? or build your framework/CMS from scratch? What version of Linux runs best for a scalable website? Would you consider Windows and .NET? Java? Or do you want to throw a brick at me for even suggesting such heresies? Would you prefer Postgres, Tomcat, Perl, Python, or any of that other *NIX fancy stuff...why or why not? Please forget for the moment, "use what you know" argument. I am pretty versatile, and can look for an expert in whatever platform I choose. So all skills being equal, I'm looking for the best community support, the fastest development time and most importantly, the best scaling approach. Let's say, for fun, that I'm planning for the website to have as many messages going back & forth as an eBay. Definitely building this on a budget.. Jason

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Why not Cache from Intersystems?

I have some experience with a very large OLTP system that is 7+ TB in size and performs very well for 30K+ concurrent users. It is built using Intersystems Cache based on the very old but very scalable MUMPS platform. Why don't I see more discussions about archiectures such as these in this forum? I am curious why this platform scales so much better then the typical RDBMS.

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n-phase commit for FS writes, reads stay local

I am trying to find a Linux FS that will allow me to replicate all writes synchronously to n nodes in a web server cluster, while keeping all reads local. It should not require specialized hardware.

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what is j2ee stack

I see everyone talk about lamp stack is less than j2ee stack .i m newbie can anyone plz explain what is j2ee stack

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Reverse Proxy

Hi, I saw an year ago that Netapp sold netcache to blu-coat, my site is a heavy NetCache user and we cached 83% of our site. We tested with Blue-coat and F5 WA and we are not getting same performce as NetCache. Any of you guys have the same issue? or somebody knows another product can handle much traffic? Thanks Rodrigo

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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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Linkedin architecture

Hi, An interesting post on Linkedin architecture: http://furiouspurpose.blogspot.com/2007/11/qcon-linkedin-architecture.html

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What CDN would you recommend?

Hi all, a I run a site that after a complete redesign have gotten a lot more traffic. The site provides free flash games, so the biggest traffic share goes to serving flash files (from about 100K and up to several megabytes in size each.) I currently host the entire site on a hosting provider that have no traffic limits. But since they are very cheap (yet have served me very well all the time with at least 99,9% uptime), I don't trust them in allowing me to continue consuming more and more bandwidth. I just guess I'm going to reach some internal limit they have on day, so I'm looking into moving all the flash content over to a content delivery network of some sort. Some recent traffic stats: August: 12 GB September: 22 GB October: 55 GB November: Currently 2,3 GB pr day on average, but it's rising.. I've been looking into Amazon S3, but have not decided on anything yet. So therefor I'm asking if there are any other provides I should consider, that operates within the same price range as Amazon does (or lower)? Best regards, Christian Felde

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Quick question about efficiently implementing Facebook 'news feed' like functionality

Im sure most are familiar with Facebooks 'news feed'. If not, the 'news feed' basically lists recent activity of all of your friends. I dont see how you can get this information efficiently from a DB: * Im assuming all user activity is inserted in a "actions" table. * first get a list of all your friends * then query the actions table to return recent activity where the activity belongs to someone on your friends list This can't be efficient especially considering some people have 200+ friends. So what am I missing? How do you think Facebook is implementing their "news feed". Im not asking for any specific details, just a general point in the right direction, as I cant see how they are implementing the 'news feed efficiently. Thanks.

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.Net2 and AJAX scalability?

Am I mad to consider using .Net2 and AJAX for a high-scalability application? In case you wonder why, it's the legacy of a website built on IIS and .Net 1.1, and we're looking for ways to make the content more attractive and interactive. In this case, it's a medical image library being shared by a few Wikis and online coursework for medical students ( < 15K users) and doctors ( < 150K users) But I'm worried about the performance overhead. We already have a performance problem because of personalising the content for users according to their type (student or doctor), and for doctors, their grade and speciality.

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