Scaling Web Sites

For the last year or so I’ve been collecting Scaling Web Site war stories and I’ve been posting them to my Microsoft internal blog. I collect them for two reasons: 1) scaling web site problems all center around persistent state management and I’m a database guy so the interest is natural, and 2) it’s amazing how frequently the same trend appears: design a central DB. Move to functional partition. Move to a horizontal partition. Somewhere through that cycle, add caching at various levels. Most skip the step hardware evolution of starting with scale-up servers and then moving to scale out clusters but even that pattern shows up remarkably frequently (e.g. eBay, and Amazon).

Scaling web site war stories:

· Scaling Amazon: http://glinden.blogspot.com/2006/02/early-amazon-splitting-website.html

· Scaling Second Life: http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2006/04/web_20_and_databases_part_1_se.html

· Scaling Technorati: http://www.royans.net/arch/2007/10/25/scaling-technorati-100-million-blogs-indexed-everyday/

· Scaling Flickr: http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2006/04/database_war_stories_3_flickr.html

· Scaling Craigslist: http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2006/04/database_war_stories_5_craigsl.html

· Scaling Findory: http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2006/05/database_war_stories_8_findory_1.html

· MySpace 2006: http://sessions.visitmix.com/upperlayer.asp?event=&session=&id=1423&year=All&search=megasite&sortChoice=&stype=

· MySpace 2007: http://sessions.visitmix.com/upperlayer.asp?event=&session=&id=1521&year=All&search=scale&sortChoice=&stype=

· Twitter, Flickr, Live Journal, Six Apart, Bloglines, Last.fm, SlideShare, and eBay: http://poorbuthappy.com/ease/archives/2007/04/29/3616/the-top-10-presentation-on-scaling-websites-twitter-flickr-bloglines-vox-and-more

Thanks to Soumitra Sengupta for sending the Flickr and PoorButHappy pointer my way and to Jeremy Mazner for sending the MySpace references.

–jrh

James Hamilton, Windows Live Platform Services
Bldg RedW-D/2072, One Microsoft Way, Redmond, Washington, 98052
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JamesRH@microsoft.com

H:mvdirona.com | W:research.microsoft.com/~jamesrh | Msft internal blog: msblogs/JamesRH

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