

Ask HN: What is a typical server setup for a hight traffic website? - pepijndevos

I run my own MAMP server, and I assume my host runs a more advanced setup with the same ingredients: Apache, MySQL and PHP.<p>What kind of stuff do sites like twitter, Facebook and Google run?<p>I now and then encounter some projects on HN used by a big site to speed things up, but I'm curious to the bigger picture.
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brk
It varies widely based on where the choke-points are in the architecture, but
it is usually something like:

Interweb--> Load Balancer--> Web servers--->Database Servers

The "Load Balancer" part can be as simple as a machine (or two) running
haproxy, to an F5 style device, to what is effectively load-balancing-as-a-
service (Akamai, etc.).

The web servers could be multiple iterations of a single server, or a pseudo
CDN setup where for a given set of machines that serve a page request, 1
machine handles serving images, 1 serves javascripts, css, and other static
text, and another generates all the dynamic content.

The database layer can often have its own load-balancing within it, depending
on the type and scale of activity. Much of this depends on how frequently the
dynamic content changes and needs to be kept up to date (a system handling
comments for a busy site needs to be more real-time than a system that just
updates news stories over some period of time.

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inetsee
If you want more information you might want to look at the High Scalability
web site "<http://www.highscalability.com>. They discuss a lot of issues
related to big, high-performance web sites, and how they scale. Some of the
posts are also relevant to smaller sites that want to improve scalability,
without investing in expensive hardware upgrades.

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johng
Also, define high traffic.

