
Scaling Fast - luccastera
http://www.lukasbiewald.com/?p=153
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ojbyrne
Been there, done that. :-) And for those about to downmod me, it was digg in
Feb. 2005 and Paris Hilton's cell phone got hacked, and we were the no.1 and
no. 3 results on yahoo search for "Paris Hilton Cell Phone" out of the blue.

It sounds like they did a better job than I did.

~~~
whacked_new
Is your experience shared in text form somewhere? If yes, please post; better
yet submit it. If no, please post, and better yet, submit it :)

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staunch
Nice site. I did spot an XSS bug:

<http://facestat.com/faces?message=%3Cscript%3Ealert>(%22test%22)%3C/script%3E

How much money did the ads bring in?

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witten
This really scares me, because I have a site with the exact same beginning
architecture on the exact same hosting provider..

I guess I had best get to work.

~~~
iseff
Please don't get to work scaling your architecture yet. Work on making your
app awesome and wanted by lots of people.

Trust me, I've been bitten by this problem myself. It's so easy to get really
worried about the number of hits you're going to take. It's also so easy to
get really excited about the scaling challenges.

But, quite frankly, the chances of you getting featured on yahoo.com are
miniscule! First focus on getting there by creating something cool. Then focus
on scaling.

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witten
That's what I've been doing so far. I'm trying not to fall into the trap of
premature-scalingitis. But the original article points out that the need for
scaling up does not always come at a time of one's choosing. And that's kind
of scary.

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witten
And then as if the gods of scaling were taunting me, right as I posted this,
my front-end web server ran out of memory and started thrashing. I had to
hard-reboot it to recover.

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pierrefar
I think the key here is that their architecture allowed for a bit of scaling.
How many companies don't have that?

You were given a chance and you capitalized on it because you could. I wonder
how many other companies failed to capitalize on their chance and went bust.

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mikeryan
Really I'm not sure what you mean - only the most naive web architectures
wouldn't allow for some type of scalability. The way they did it was with the
old "Throw More Machines At It " method. I'm not sure this ever really shows a
mo better web arch - even spaghetti PHP can do that pretty easily.

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blader
Wow Lucas, you put our scaling story to shame.

When are you guys coming by and visiting dude?

~~~
whacked_new
I can't believe your comment got downmodded. I'm biased though, because I read
your story.

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blader
Thanks for looking out, lol.

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smanek
Does anyone think it is worth it to set up your site/service on EC3 with
something like Scalr, so your site automatically expands to handle the load?

It would take time away from adding features and delay your launch, but it may
help you handle huge bursts like this. But then again, it could slow down your
development enough that your competitors get the huge burst, and by the time
you're ready your niche is already passe.

With the ridiculously quick news cycles we have today you may only get one
chance - so is the ability to capitalize on it worth the cost?

~~~
PStamatiou
EC2 _

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wenbert
two thumbs up to slice host :D

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markbao
Yeah, that's pretty much the perfect problem. Your servers go down since
you're getting too many hits.

