Posted by faulkes on 01/06/08 16:40

On Jan 6, 1:45 am, FFMG <FFMG.32r...@no-mx.httppoint.com> wrote:
> Jerry Stuckle;111941 Wrote:
>
>
>
> > You should ALWAYS write the site to scale. It's not any harder. And
> > even if it is just an "administrative back end", are you SURE there
> > will
> > never be two administrators changing at the same time?
>
> > Such "assumptions" are traps waiting to spring.
>
> Can you suggest some links/tutorial on scaling a site?
>

Note: skip to the bottom for some useful links.

Scalability isn't addressable in a single point, you first have to
determine
the what and why you need to scale. It's really easy to say "You
should always
write your code to scale" and of course, those people should be shot.
It isn't
useful and doesn't tell you anything and if there is one thing I've
learned, when
an application goes from development to the users, they will
invariabley find a
way to make it die().

So, where does that leave us? There was an old addage about
scalability, which was
if you are building an app you expect to support 100 users, design it
to support
1000 users, if you are building it to support 1000 users, design it to
support
10,000 users, etc.. etc..

You can design an app perfectly to support 1 million users but if you
only have
a dialup connection, it won't do you much good. Scalability covers
everything
not only from the code perspective but down to your network
perspective (lb's,
reverse caching, memcache, redundant bandwidth, redundant servers,
etc)

Start with the IBM series of articles (note, I do not work for IBM):

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-tune-lamp-1/#resources
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-tune-lamp-2.html?ca=dgr-lnxw01LAMPTuningP2
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/opensource/library/os-php-fastapps2/

Those should cover your basics of the single server and php, google
the rest out
for load balancing, caching, etc.

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