Server Power-ups That Worked For Our Startup: Handling 10x Traffic
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Re: Server Power-ups That Worked For Our Startup: Handling 10x Traffic
#2Good topic, but of course if you were starting now you would just begin on EC2 and be done with it.
Re: Server Power-ups That Worked For Our Startup: Handling 10x Traffic
#3This is a remarkably sane and bullshit-free description
Re: Server Power-ups That Worked For Our Startup: Handling 10x Traffic
#4This is a remarkably sane and bullshit-free description
Ya, but that comment is not bullshit-free.
Re: Server Power-ups That Worked For Our Startup: Handling 10x Traffic
#5I haven't really had to scale a system up like this before. As a freelance web developer moving to a bigger slice? on linode has been good enough for any wordpress blog or simple site.
That said, I didn't realize what a massive undertaking it could be like this describes.
Anyone had any similar scaling challenges with less conventional web-stacks? Im particular I'm wondering how a node.js/mongodb stack would do this same thing.
Re: Server Power-ups That Worked For Our Startup: Handling 10x Traffic
#6Text gets cut off in mobile safari.
Re: Server Power-ups That Worked For Our Startup: Handling 10x Traffic
#7This is a great writeup Robert. Thanks for the overview.
What were the primary factors that signaled it was time to move to AWS for you guys? What else were you considering at the time?
Re: Server Power-ups That Worked For Our Startup: Handling 10x Traffic
#8You can get away with following oral(blog)-history scaling lore at that low end, but before you scale much further the most important thing by far is to be more metrics and measurement oriented. The most basic one to start with is average http response time and http requests per second.
For instance, say your slicehost returned a page at an average of 200ms, but only below 10 req/second, over that it started to bottleneck somewhere and responses would shoot up to 500+ms. Then your question is "how to I handle 100 http requests per second while keeping the average at or below 200ms".
Eventually you'll need to step up to full-browser-render (gomez, keynote, browsermob, homegrown-selenium) time, appdex or 95th% based numbers instead of simple averages, and backend components like mysql req/s and service time.
The point is, this is engineering, use numbers.
Re: Server Power-ups That Worked For Our Startup: Handling 10x Traffic
#9I haven't really had to scale a system up like this before. As a freelance web developer moving to a bigger slice? on linode has been good enough for any wordpress blog or simple site. That said, I didn't realize what a massive undertaking it could be like this describes. Anyone had any similar scaling challenges with less conventional web-stacks? Im particular I'm wondering how a node.js/mongodb stack would do this…
I have scaled many systems in the past and the easy answer is: Know what you're doing or hire someone who does.
There is no blanket answer because applications and workloads differ. E.g. MongoDB has a number of documented issues under high load (esp. high write load), in some scenarios they can be worked around with reasonable trade-offs, in some they can't and Mongo needs to be replaced.
If there's one general thing to say about scaling then that you scale applications, not stacks. The stack will usually change in the process.
Re: Server Power-ups That Worked For Our Startup: Handling 10x Traffic
#10Good topic, but of course if you were starting now you would just begin on EC2 and be done with it.
Depends on the goals. They didn't say how much their "10x traffic" actually is, but by the sound of it they could probably save money by moving to dedicated hardware.