scaling

Website Hardware Scaling

So I was listening to the latest Stackoverflow podcast (episode 19), and Jeff and Joel talked a bit about scaling server hardware as a website grows. From what Joel was saying, the first few steps are pretty standard: One server running both the webserver and the database (the current Stackoverflow setup) One webserver and one databas...

Moving ViewState out of the page?

We are trying to lighten our page load as much as possible. Since ViewState can sometimes swell up to 100k of the page, I'd love to completely eliminate it. I'd love to hear some techniques other people have used to move ViewState to a custom provider. That said, a few caveats: We serve on average 2 Million unique visitors per hour. ...

Scaling cheaply: MySQL and MS SQL

How cheap can MySQL be compared to MS SQL when you have tons of data (and joins/search)? Consider a site like stackoverflow full of Q&As already and after getting dugg. My ASP.NET sites are currently on SQL Server Express so I don't have any idea how cost compares in the long run. Although after a quick research, I'm starting to envy ...

When people talk about scaling a website with 'shards', what do they mean?

I have heard the 'shard' technique mentioned several times with regard to solving scaling problems for large websites. What is this 'shard' technique and why is it so good? ...

Distributed Concurrency Control

I've been working on this for a few days now, and I've found several solutions but none of them incredibly simple or lightweight. The problem is basically this: We have a cluster of 10 machines, each of which is running the same software on a multithreaded ESB platform. I can deal with concurrency issues between threads on the same mac...

Can I get the old full screen scaling with FLVPlayback and flash 9.0.115+?

With previous versions of flash, entering the full screen mode increased the height and width of the stage to the dimensions of the screen. Now that hardware scaling has arrived, the height and width are set to the dimensions of the video (plus borders if the aspect ratio is different). That's fine, unless you have controls placed over...

What are you using for Distributed Caching in web farms running ASP.NET?

I am curious as to what others are using in this situation. I know a couple of the options that are out there like a memcached port or ScaleOutSoftware. The memcached ports don't seem to be actively worked on (correct me if I'm wrong). ScaleOutSoftware is too expensive for me (I don't doubt it is worth it). This is not to say that I ...

How do you Schedule Index Updates in CouchDB

As far as I understand, CouchDB indexes are updated when a view is queried. Assuming there are more reads than writes, isn't this bad for scaling? How would I configure CouchDB to update indexes on writes, or better yet, on a schedule? ...

Extreme Sharding: One SQLite Database Per User

I'm working on a web app that is somewhere between an email service and a social network. I feel it has the potential to grow really big in the future, so I'm concerned about scalability. Instead of using one centralized MySQL/InnoDB database and then partitioning it when that time comes, I've decided to create a separate SQLite databa...

Java GUI Resolution Independant Scaling

Hi, I'm working on a large legacy java application for which an important feature was automatic scaling of GUI Components based on monitor resolution. We are upgrading the JVM on which it runs from 1.4.2 to 1.6 and now the scaling is broken due to a change in the implementation of java.awt.Container.getPreferredSize(). getPrefferedSiz...

Scaling solutions for MySQL (Replication, Clustering)

At the startup I'm working at we are now considering scaling solutions for our database. Things get somewhat confusing (for me at least) with MySQL, which has the MySQL cluster, replication and MySQL cluster replication (from ver. 5.1.6), which is an asynchronous version of the MySQL cluster. The MySQL manual explains some of the differe...

Resizing XAML properties

Is there a way to have XAML properties scale along with the size of the uielements they belong to? In essence, I have a control template that I have created too large for it's use/ mainly because I want to use the same control with different sizes. The problem is that I can set the control size to Auto (in the ControlTemplate), however ...

How do you scale HTTP server like Google?

I often marvel at how I can go to www.google.com, from anywhere in the world at any time, and get the returned page so fast. Sure, they compress their output and keep to a minimal design - that helps. But they must have millions of simultaneous hits to the box sitting on the web that DNS lists as "www.google.com". All of you who have ...

Large custom survey / reporting applications - best practice

The situation When you study social sciences, you are frequently confronted with the need for online surveys (scientific data collection online). That's one of the main reasons why I started with PHP in the first place. Recently these survey applications have grown and grown. A lot of complexity has been added: reporting (flash charts,...

Scaling strategies for Service Tiers on .NET

I'm working on a web product that is composed of many modular web applications. To the end user, it appears to be one single application, though various components are broken out into their own apps. Part of the reasoning for this is so that it can be easily scaled horizontally across multiple application servers. To facilitate easier ...

Load Balancing in Amazon EC2?

We've been fighting with HAProxy for a few days now in Amazon EC2; the experience has so far been great, but we're stuck on squeezing more performance out of the software load balancer. We're not exactly Linux networking whizzes (we're a .NET shop, normally), but we've so far held our own, attempting to set proper ulimits, inspecting ker...

Which Memcached client library should I use for .NET ?

I've noticed there are a few solutions to allow the use of memcached on C# / ASP.NET: memcacheddotnet enyim.com Memcached Client BeIT Which one should I use? It seems like the enyim port has more active development, but I wanted to see what you guys recommend. ...

Comparison: DB Full Text search to Search engine (Lucene)

With stackoveflow.com in perspective (team of 2-3 engineers building a website project intended to scale) does it make sense to spend effort early in the process of development to build a search based on Lucene/Autonomy… as opposed to a database based full text search. Pros/Cons: With a mature Lucene implementation like nutch or auton...

wxWidgets: Is there any way to avoid or to speed up wxBitmap::ConvertToImage() ?

To get some smooth graphics, I want to draw oversampled by factor 2 and scale down afterwards. So what I am doing is to draw oversampled on a wxBitmap in a wxMemoryDC, and then scale it down before copying to my dc. The code below works fine, but bitmapOversampled.ConvertToImage(); is extremely slow. Is there any way to achieve the sam...

To Ajaxify Or Not?

I really love the way Ajax makes a web app perform more like a desktop app, but I'm worried about the hits on a high volume site. I'm developing a database app right now that's intranet based, that no more then 2-4 people are going to be accessing at one time. I'm Ajaxing the hell out of it, but it got me to wondering, how much Ajax is...