http://highscalability.com/ http://highscalability.com/ has some fantastic articles. The best tool to learn how to use is memcached - it has clients in most ma

http://highscalability.com/ http://highscalability.com/ has some fantastic articles. The best tool to learn how to use is memcached - it has clients in most major languages (And even some obscure ones) and when used properly can remove a lot of the typical problems for you. Part of what I found with memcached is that it forces you to think in terms of encapsulated data. Instead of thinking about your database all the time, the database becomes a tool. What's more important however is consumable bite sized chunks of data that your application is using, and finding ways to get to them quickly. Stay away from apache: it's far to slow and unwieldy for most scaling. I'm a huge fan of LigHTTPD (http://lighttpd.net http://lighttpd.net) but a lot of people also swear by Nginx (http://nginx.net http://nginx.net). Depending on your language... find ways to tune away any of the runtime slowdowns such as translation to byte code. With PHP find a byte code cacher, learn it tune and and rely upon it. The LigHTTPD guys make a great cacher called XCache (http://xcache.lighttpd.net http://xcache.lighttpd.net) which I've used on a few big sites. It plays nice with Lighttpd and is actively maintained.