Dedicated Servers + Scalable Web Architectures

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Mon, Jun 23, 2008 at 01:02:13PM -0600, Marc Lanctot wrote:
> First I will introduce myself. I'm a grad CS student who'll soon be 
> living in Toronto. I'm 28 years old and have been back and forth from 
> academia to the industry. I've been involved with Linux for some time 
> now, mostly system admin experience -- no kernel hacking or anything 
> like that....... yet? I'm very happy to see that there is what looks to 
> be an active Linux User community in Toronto and I'm looking forward to 
> meeting some of you soon.
> 
> I am looking into building a new "Web 2.0" web site which focuses on 
> user-contributed content. I have lots of ideas and after thinking about 
> this and discussing it for about a month, I think I can "do it properly" 
> when it comes to the actual building of the site.. eg. I have a wealth 
> of experience with Apache, MySQL, PHP etc. but I lack experience in the 
> large-scale/high-performance realm. I expect(hope?) the site to get 
> really popular, really quickly, and so I need to be prepared to handle 
> lots of hits and quick data retrieval.

Does anyone actually know what Web 2.0 is besides a silly marketing
term?

> That being said, I have real questions:
> 
> 1. I'd like a *reliable* dedicated server to host the site. I'd prefer 
> one hosted in Toronto or Montreal for low trip response times, but 
> that's not crucial. I tried tophostingcenter but their service was 
> really bad (I can elaborate on that). I've now (temporarily) gone back 
> with ServerPronto because I had used it before.. it was affordable, very 
> reliable, and their customer service was just awesome. However, if I can 
> do as well with a local server I'd surely consider it.
> 
> 2. I'd like a recommendation on an architecture or *good* book on this 
> subject, or even better pointer to scientific studies which compare 
> different architectures in practical experiments. I'm very familiar with 
> the Apache/MySQL/PHP setup so that is my current preference -- as long 
> as it can scale! I'd be happy using Tomcat/JSP/Servlets if it means it 
> means better scalability in the end. People have told me that Ruby on 
> Rails doesn't scale-- after playing with it a bit two years ago it 
> doesn't seem hard to believe, but it was still more of a superficial 
> investigation than anything else.
> 
> Ultimately, I'd like if people can give me recommendations based on 
> their experiences rather than suspicions, but I think any discussion 
> that come of this might be generally useful to us all.

Well at least in my expeirence, MySQL doesn't scale.  Unless you almost
exclusively read from it it doesn't like lots of users.  Postgresql is
much much better that way.  I really have no idea why people always seem
to go for mysql first rather than looking into what is available and
picking the better choice.

-- 
Len Sorensen
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