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

Develop your site using solid OOP techniques. You will need your site to be modular as not all performance bottlenecks are obvious at the start. Be ready to refactor parts of your site as traffic increases. The first sentence I wrote will help you do it more easily and safely. Also, use test driven development, As refactor means new introduced bugs, and good TDD is good in catching them before they go into production.
Separate as much as possible client side code from server side code, as they will likely to be served from different servers, if your site traffic justify this.
Read articles (read the YSlow tips for instance).

GL