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7 Stages of Scaling Web Applications

49 points by vp 18y ago

jwilliams 18y ago
Great post! It points out up front that performance != scale. The other scaling point is concurrency. You can't (for example) serially add features to a page. Eventually that page will simply take too long to render. A lot of "dashboard" pages suffer from this problem. If you reach that stage you need to start thinking about decoupling features - using things like messaging.
- Retric 18y ago
  For most companies performance might as well scale. For example Slashdot uses 4 machines. Now if you are serving up a lot of media that changes things but a single web server can handle a lot of traffic if your app is reasonable. PS: This is a presentation by Rackspace of course they are going to say write bad software and buy lot's of hardware.
  - jwilliams 18y ago
    I'll admit that depending on your situation you may be more concerned with performance over scalability - but doesn't make them the same thing. Scale is getting higher throughput by adding resources - Performance is getting higher throughput using the resources you already have.
- habs 18y ago
  Surely concurrency has more to do with performance than scaling? Scaling is more about a product's ability to easily grow and handle an increasing amounts of work, rather than it's ability to render/dish out pages.
  - jwilliams 18y ago
    > Surely concurrency has more to do with performance than scaling? What I meant to say was concurrency is a way of distributing load and getting scalability.... But, yeah, you're right - my example was terrible/inaccurate.
tdavis 18y ago
The only change I would make to the "stages" is to add caching up front. Most modern web frameworks make the use of caching pretty trivial therefor making it less of a pain than setting up load balancers and multiple web servers, etc. Static content should also make use of caching headers and be served by a separate server than dynamic content; this is also a trivial improvement. Having only a single web server, database server, and static content server while making liberal use of caching and smart querying result in benchmarks indicating we can sustain around 1900 req/sec. Even if that isn't entirely accurate, the chances of us reaching the 82 million page views per month to find out is all but inconceivable.
- litewulf 18y ago
  Caching is hard though, and its best to use profiling to decide what to cache. Especially if you have any sort of user-specific content, you need to resort to fragment caching which is sometimes tricky.
- alecco 18y ago
  1900 req/sec What kind of requests? Typically dynamic content usually is well below 300 req/s per core and goes down fast on many factors (e.g. non-local database.) Most web frameworks are usually below the 300 req/s mark. Of course it is a very complex subject as there are many things to consider. Good cache management, CDN, SSI, and reverse cache come to mind. About databases, it can become a problem if you do writes on the same database as locking starts to show its dangerous tentacles.
alecco 18y ago
I agree on many points like performance and scalability are not the same but his traditional approach to just make a bigger clustered database is not good. It's like fixing the bottleneck by making a gigantic bottle, it'll work but the cost will be many times over what was really necessary. If a any single component is a critical bottleneck the best is to either replace it or redesign to stop requiring it. Same goes for the more memory approach.
- litewulf 18y ago
  The day your website starts generating more traffic than one server can handle you need to do something very quickly to make sure it all stays up. So I think its often reasonable to pay the exorbitant prices as a stopgap before you can start doing any of the more complex scalability re-architecturing.
  - alecco 18y ago
    That's a very addictive and self-validating reasoning path. Beware.
    - litewulf 18y ago
      Scaling is painful and requires a good deal of upfront work. I can't guarantee that anyone will use stuff that I make, so I'd rather improve performance when I actually need to. Its addictive also to spend all your time thinking about scalability and sharding and clustering options instead of making something people use. In summary: yes, but be pragmatic about these things. If you are the only user, scaling might not be worth it. If you know that people will be using a feature all the time, think about caching from the get-go. Obviously figuring out which of the cases you are in can sometimes be tricky. ;)
      - alecco 18y ago
        Its addictive also to spend all your time thinking about scalability and sharding and clustering options instead of making something people use. I never proposed that. But leaving doors open for possible alternatives and quick fixes doesn't take much time, maybe 5 minutes of thinking. Sane programming methodologies help, like modularization and partitioning your code in different processes. Scalability and rapid development are not always mutually exclusive.
ken 18y ago
There's something weird about reading an August 2008 presentation that says "Source Control: RCS, CVS, Subversion" -- right between slides mentioning "64-bit" and "cloud computing". I haven't used CVS in at least 5 years, and I've never even seen RCS in use. Part of me wonders if RCS is Rackspace's secret weapon.

49 points by vp 18y ago

Great post! It points out up front that performance != scale. The other scaling point is concurrency. You can't (for example) serially add features to a page. Eventually that page will simply take too long to render. A lot of "dashboard" pages suffer from this problem. If you reach that stage you need to start thinking about decoupling features - using things like messaging.

Retric 18y ago
For most companies performance might as well scale. For example Slashdot uses 4 machines. Now if you are serving up a lot of media that changes things but a single web server can handle a lot of traffic if your app is reasonable. PS: This is a presentation by Rackspace of course they are going to say write bad software and buy lot's of hardware.
- jwilliams 18y ago
  I'll admit that depending on your situation you may be more concerned with performance over scalability - but doesn't make them the same thing. Scale is getting higher throughput by adding resources - Performance is getting higher throughput using the resources you already have.
habs 18y ago
Surely concurrency has more to do with performance than scaling? Scaling is more about a product's ability to easily grow and handle an increasing amounts of work, rather than it's ability to render/dish out pages.
- jwilliams 18y ago
  > Surely concurrency has more to do with performance than scaling? What I meant to say was concurrency is a way of distributing load and getting scalability.... But, yeah, you're right - my example was terrible/inaccurate.

tdavis 18y ago

The only change I would make to the "stages" is to add caching up front. Most modern web frameworks make the use of caching pretty trivial therefor making it less of a pain than setting up load balancers and multiple web servers, etc. Static content should also make use of caching headers and be served by a separate server than dynamic content; this is also a trivial improvement. Having only a single web server, database server, and static content server while making liberal use of caching and smart querying result in benchmarks indicating we can sustain around 1900 req/sec. Even if that isn't entirely accurate, the chances of us reaching the 82 million page views per month to find out is all but inconceivable.

litewulf 18y ago
Caching is hard though, and its best to use profiling to decide what to cache. Especially if you have any sort of user-specific content, you need to resort to fragment caching which is sometimes tricky.
alecco 18y ago
1900 req/sec What kind of requests? Typically dynamic content usually is well below 300 req/s per core and goes down fast on many factors (e.g. non-local database.) Most web frameworks are usually below the 300 req/s mark. Of course it is a very complex subject as there are many things to consider. Good cache management, CDN, SSI, and reverse cache come to mind. About databases, it can become a problem if you do writes on the same database as locking starts to show its dangerous tentacles.

alecco 18y ago

I agree on many points like performance and scalability are not the same but his traditional approach to just make a bigger clustered database is not good. It's like fixing the bottleneck by making a gigantic bottle, it'll work but the cost will be many times over what was really necessary. If a any single component is a critical bottleneck the best is to either replace it or redesign to stop requiring it. Same goes for the more memory approach.

litewulf 18y ago
The day your website starts generating more traffic than one server can handle you need to do something very quickly to make sure it all stays up. So I think its often reasonable to pay the exorbitant prices as a stopgap before you can start doing any of the more complex scalability re-architecturing.
- alecco 18y ago
  That's a very addictive and self-validating reasoning path. Beware.
  - litewulf 18y ago
    Scaling is painful and requires a good deal of upfront work. I can't guarantee that anyone will use stuff that I make, so I'd rather improve performance when I actually need to. Its addictive also to spend all your time thinking about scalability and sharding and clustering options instead of making something people use. In summary: yes, but be pragmatic about these things. If you are the only user, scaling might not be worth it. If you know that people will be using a feature all the time, think about caching from the get-go. Obviously figuring out which of the cases you are in can sometimes be tricky. ;)
    - alecco 18y ago
      Its addictive also to spend all your time thinking about scalability and sharding and clustering options instead of making something people use. I never proposed that. But leaving doors open for possible alternatives and quick fixes doesn't take much time, maybe 5 minutes of thinking. Sane programming methodologies help, like modularization and partitioning your code in different processes. Scalability and rapid development are not always mutually exclusive.

ken 18y ago

There's something weird about reading an August 2008 presentation that says "Source Control: RCS, CVS, Subversion" -- right between slides mentioning "64-bit" and "cloud computing". I haven't used CVS in at least 5 years, and I've never even seen RCS in use. Part of me wonders if RCS is Rackspace's secret weapon.