loving the dot com

While trying to book tickets to this year’s Reading Festival, I was once again frustrated by the main website (readingfestival.com) and it’s lack of ability to handle the increase in traffic as tickets are released for purchase and the lineup is announced. This frustration reminded me of a few sites I came across recently, some related research into designing sites for High Scalability, and systems for temporary load management. Here’s some stuff developers might find useful….

The first of these is the site HighScalability.com - as the title suggests, if offers tips and articles on exactly how to build a scalable site, and has some very handy interviews with tech staff from some very high traffic sites, such as YouTube and Flickr.

Looking at YouTube, there’s a great video from the Seattle Conference on Scalability from one of the YouTube staff about how they have successfully managed to grow their system on commodity hardware and open source software, such as MySQLкомпютри втора употреба. Watch the video here.

If you’re interested in working with MySQL, there is a PDF presentation available on Scribd which talks through a lot of the key issues developers face when scaling to heavy traffic loads. This one is well worth a read - see it here.

Lastly is a system which will allow you to quickly scale your application at low cost if you’re in absolute dire need. Enter Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). There is too much behind the system to explain here, but it basically allows you to manage exactly how and what you want to scale by booting your own reusable images inside the cloud. Fans of Facebook will have no doubt heard of the iLike application, there’s a good explanation of how they used the cloud to scale their application here.

Oh - and don’t forget to get your Reading Festival tickets! No doubt the main site is still crippled under the load, so you can read the line-up and get ticket information from readinglineup.com.