Techniques for writing a scalable website

Question

I am new in the website scalability realm. Can you suggest to me some the techniques for making a website scalable to a large number of users?

Answer 1

If you expect your site to scale beyond the capabilities of a single server you will need to plan carefully. Design so the following will be possible:-

• Make it so your database can be on a separate server. This isn't normally too hard.
• Ensure all your static content can be moved to a CDN, as this will normally pull a lot of load off your servers.
• Be prepared to spend a lot of money on hardware. More RAM and faster disks help a LOT.
• It gets a lot harder when you need to split either the database or the php from a single server to multiple servers, so optimise everything, from your code, your database schema, your server config and anything else you can think of to put this final step off for as long as possible.

Other than that, all you can do is stress test your site, figure out where the bottlenecks are and try and design them away.