NYCPHP Meetup

[Chris Shiflett]

Hi Marc,

> I'm a developer who has concentrated more on smaller-scale projects,
> but as it turns out one of my projects is beginning to stress the
> limits of a single server, and so I'm about to begin venturing into
> the unknown.
> 
> The project is currently in the "tens of thousands" of users range,
> but it looks like we need to start drafting a plan to scale it up
> to "hundreds of thousands" to a million or so users.

I recommend my colleague Theo Schlossnagle's book, Scalable Internet
Architectures. It addresses these exact types of questions in a "teach a
man to fish" sort of way.

> This is a site that is running on a custom built PHP framework
> (which seems to be performing rather well), and MySQL.

I'm not a scalability expert, but one thing I've learned is that many
things that perform well now can still cause problems when the scale
increases, so keep your mind open to all possibilities.

> If I had to classify the site, I'd say it follows a similar usage
> pattern as something like last.fm, or facebook, only much smaller.

Do you have the feature that allows people to see how many degrees away
they are from another user?

Anyway, read that book. :-)

Chris

-- 
Chris Shiflett
http://shiflett.org/