Adventures of scaling eins.de
Patrick Lenz , founder and lead developer of freshmeat.net was also responsible for the relaunch of another website eins.de which recently moved from php to ruby. Eins.de site serves about 1.2 million dynamic pages a day. He wrote a series of articles describing how they redesigned the site to scale for growth. I found these articles very informative with a extreemly mature discussion of the colorful world of scalability. The adventures of scaling, Stage 1 Questions and answers for Stage 1 The adventures of scaling, Stage 2 The adventures of scaling, Stage 3 The adventures of scaling, Stage 4 Here is the final summary of what they ended up after 4 months of optimizations Systems optimization Use Linux 2.6 instead of 2.4 Use self-compiled Ruby 1.8.4 instead of all else Use MySQL-supplied binaries Use lighttpd 1.4.11 instead of all else Use memcache-client instead of Ruby-MemCache Use a smaller amount of dispatchers Watch your dispatchers Code optimizatio