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How They Scale Their Apps: From Flickr to Craigslist

For many developers focused on applications that reside on the web, including open source developers working on database-centric and software-as-a-service sites, the issue of scaling applications is increasingly important. You can find a couple of recent columns we did on cloud computing solutions for scaling applications here. Today, a post on scalability over at James Hamilton's blog caught my eye. He starts out with a discussion of how the database architecture underlying Flickr is constructed, but what's really striking is his  collection of posts from around the web on how sites ranging from Craigslist to Technorati to Second Life approach scalability.

Hamilton's discussion of Flickr scaling is based on an online slide presentation found here. Among the tools he reports underlying Flickr's 12 terabytes of user data are MySQL and a PHP access layer.

If you look through the links in Hamilton's post, you'll find good, inside information on how the following sites approach scalability: LinkedIn, Amazon, Second Life, Technorati, Flickr, Craigslist, LiveJournal, SixApart, Findory, MySpace, Twitter, eBay, and more. Among the common themes found under-the-hood at many of these sites are MySQL, memcached, PHP, and Ruby on Rails. One of the links Hamilton has dug up is an uber-link to a series of presentations on how numerous large and popular sites achieve their scale, from Peter Van Dijck, found here.  Good reading. 

• mysql
• ruby on rails
• php
• memcached

by an anonymous user on Jul. 16, 2008

Will be interesting to see what Twitter is doing here, since they have obviously been having scaling issues with Ruby on Rails.

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