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Ask HN: What is a typical server setup for a hight traffic website?
I run my own MAMP server, and I assume my host runs a more advanced setup with the same ingredients: Apache, MySQL and PHP.
What kind of stuff do sites like twitter, Facebook and Google run?
I now and then encounter some projects on HN used by a big site to speed things up, but I'm curious to the bigger picture.
- brk 16y agoIt varies widely based on where the choke-points are in the architecture, but it is usually something like: Interweb--> Load Balancer--> Web servers--->Database Servers The "Load Balancer" part can be as simple as a machine (or two) running haproxy, to an F5 style device, to what is effectively load-balancing-as-a-service (Akamai, etc.). The web servers could be multiple iterations of a single server, or a pseudo CDN setup where for a given set of machines that serve a page request, 1 machine handles serving images, 1 serves javascripts, css, and other static text, and another generates all the dynamic content. The database layer can often have its own load-balancing within it, depending on the type and scale of activity. Much of this depends on how frequently the dynamic content changes and needs to be kept up to date (a system handling comments for a busy site needs to be more real-time than a system that just updates news stories over some period of time.
- johng 16y agoAlso, define high traffic.
- inetsee 16y agoIf you want more information you might want to look at the High Scalability web site "http://www.highscalability.com http://www.highscalability.com. They discuss a lot of issues related to big, high-performance web sites, and how they scale. Some of the posts are also relevant to smaller sites that want to improve scalability, without investing in expensive hardware upgrades.