Tag Archives: scalability

Treasure trove of scalability stories – Flickr, Digg, FeedBurner, LiveJournal, SixApart, Last.fm, Twitter, WordPress

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If you are having sleepless nights about scaling your website to take on a 3x/10x/100X loadburst in a short time, here’s a resource that many will be willing to pay a king’s ransom for. These are a bunch of presentations about some of the biggest websites in the world and their scalability stories (I call them stories because each case is a unique narrative, much like a grandma’s story). Slideshare has a “Webapp Scalability” group and this contains an awesome collection of presentations from websites like Digg, Flickr, LiveJournal, FeedBurner, SixApart, Last.fm etc. As I wrote in this previous post, scalability is experiential in nature and there’s nothing like learning from what others are doing. One might be tempted into thinking that this is plagiarism with a sugar coating; but I beg to differ on this; a very big part of innovation is “imitation” and as long as you are proving to be a net addition to the body of existing knowledge, there is no harm in this.

One of the great things about mature ecosystems (like Silicon Valley) is that, there is so much cross pollination happening because of people meeting at talks, conferences etc.


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I really yearn for something like this in India, where people are not scared of sharing their learnings with the community. Cynical as I may sound, I do not see this happening at all in India (inspite of all the unconferences etc). I guess this requires a shift in mindset, which is going to take some time.

Check out the collection here

Webapp Scalability woes…getting your MYSQL database to run fast & clean

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This post is for the techies & geeks.

Just sharing this wonderful resource, that’s currently one of the most popular slide decks on slideshare. This is a presentation on MySQL tuning, from somebody who works at MYSQL. Titled “15 Ways to Kill your MYSQL peformance“, it’s a straight-from-the-pits, hands on presentation on how to get the best from your MYSQL databse.

If you work at a web startup, there’s a 95% chances that you are using MYSQL as your database. Its also likely that you still haven’t got to the stage, where a database administrator has become a necessity; this job is being done by your coders. This presentation could come in handy. From my experience of running a large, fast growing consumer internet website, getting your database to run fast, clean & efficient is a serious bottleneck to scalability of your website and hence your business. The good news is that scalability problems afflict you only when you get to a threshold; the bad news is that scalability (unlike the act of building your webapp) is largely experiential in nature, and there is little substitute to having somebody on your team who has done this before. Or you might need to learn from scratch.

My tech team found this presentation very useful, so thought of sharing it here for the benefit of others. Do let me know what you thought of this…..