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Building Scalable Web Sites: Building, Scaling, and Optimizing the Next Generation of Web Applications

Cal Henderson · 9 HN comments
HN Books has aggregated all Hacker News stories and comments that mention "Building Scalable Web Sites: Building, Scaling, and Optimizing the Next Generation of Web Applications" by Cal Henderson.
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Amazon Summary
Learn the tricks of the trade so you can build and architect applications that scale quickly--without all the high-priced headaches and service-level agreements associated with enterprise app servers and proprietary programming and database products. Culled from the experience of the Flickr.com lead developer, Building Scalable Web Sites offers techniques for creating fast sites that your visitors will find a pleasure to use. Creating popular sites requires much more than fast hardware with lots of memory and hard drive space. It requires thinking about how to grow over time, how to make the same resources accessible to audiences with different expectations, and how to have a team of developers work on a site without creating new problems for visitors and for each other. Presenting information to visitors from all over the world Integrating email with your web applications Planning hardware purchases and hosting options to have as much as you need without breaking your wallet Partitioning and distributing databases to support large datasets and simultaneous transactions Monitoring your applications to find and clear bottlenecks * Providing services APIs and using services from other providers to increase your site's reach and capabilities Whether you're starting a small web site with hopes of growing big or you already have a large system that needs maintenance, you'll find Building Scalable Web Sites to be a library of ideas for making things work.
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Hacker News Stories and Comments

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Slightly dated, but I recommend Cal's book on the lessons we learned scaling Flickr, http://www.amazon.com/Building-Scalable-Web-Sites-Applicatio...

Also remember that premature scaling is one of the leading causes of failure.

I'd never heard of the C10K (http://www.kegel.com/c10k.html) but I love scaling issues and this looks to be some fascinating reading. Thanks!

EDIT Interesting annecdote... Cal Henderson is the author of "Building Scalable Websites" http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0596102356 and has worked in "the trenches" as the lead engineer of FLICKR and developer at B3TA.

Apparently his newest company http://tinyspeck.com/ is using node.js for their game engine.

Assuming he's planning on scaling to a reasonable size, that seems to be a pretty resounding endorsement that there's at least something going for it. I mean ... that guy's got a bit of experience in working at scale.

Dec 19, 2010 · blurry on Recommended Reading
If scalability is relevant to your product, this is an accessible classic:

http://www.amazon.com/Building-Scalable-Web-Sites-Applicatio...

For frontend stuff:

High Performance Web Sites Essential Knowledge for Front-End Engineers (By Steve Souders) http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596529307

And for an intro to scalability:

Building Scalable Web Sites: Building, Scaling, and Optimizing the Next Generation of Web Applications (By Cal Henderson) http://www.amazon.com/Building-Scalable-Web-Sites-Applicatio...

You might want to read Cal Henderson's book Building Scalable Web Sites: http://www.amazon.com/dp/0596102356/
Jun 04, 2008 · apexauk on Ask YC: Speeding up PHP
also good for optimising that side of things is http://www.thinkvitamin.com/features/webapps/serving-javascr... - and in fact Cal Henderson's whole book has been a great read - http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0596102356
Hehe...perhaps it didn't really surprise me so much, maybe I was just hoping for it to be a bit better!

I really don't like code that "hacks together" a solution and then requires a substantial remedy later (who does?!) so I'm quite interested in getting it right from the beginning.

Assuming that many of us here develop web applications, and that some are going to need to scale heavily, what do you recommend as a good solution?

I have yet to read either of these two books, but they are on my list (I only have one at home, the other I'll order): http://www.amazon.co.uk/Building-Scalable-Web-Sites-Henderso... http://www.amazon.co.uk/Performance-MySQL-Advanced-Technique...

Both are O'Reilly so I'm assuming they'll be good!

Let me know if you have any other resources for this, because I imagine it's a very common issue for successful startups.

aston
"High Performance MySQL [and other oxymorons]"

Not a bad book, though, for letting you know about all of the random features MySQL has. It's hard to get the same information in one place otherwise.

great list. I'll take some time to go through this. To this I'd add the

- JOS software reading list [0]

- JOS management reading list [1]

There are gaps in these lists but pretty much cover the best for both programmers & business - types. But the lists needs updating as I note pg's 'Painters & Hackers' is not listed nor is Cal Hendersons 'Building Scalable Websites' [3].

Reference

[0] Joel On Software 'Book Review, reading list'

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/navLinks/fog0000000262.html

[1] Joel On Software, 'Management reading list'

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/FogCreekMBACurriculum.html

[3] Cal Henderson, 'Building Scalable Web Sites, 978-0596102357':

http://www.amazon.com/Building-Scalable-Web-Sites-Applications/dp/0596102356

danw
Hackers and Painters is on my list three times :)

I'm going to have to check out Cal Hendersons book sometime but first I have to make a good site then I can worry about scaling it.

bootload
yeah shows how much I read. Hence why i like short lists. Take the time to also listen to CH on Carson Workshops [0] & this one [1]. Also check out the O'Reilly chapter from the book [2].

[0] Carson Workshops, 'The Future of Web Apps, carsonworkshops.com/summit, Cal Henderson'

http://media.libsyn.com/media/carsonsystems/Cal_Henderson.mp3

[1] Carson Workshops, 'Building Enterprise Web Apps on a Budget – How We Built Flickr, ~ 10Mb, 10 min.'

http://odeo.com/audio/1207043/view

[2] O'Reilly, 'O'Reilly, Building Scalable Web Sites, Cal Henderson. Chapter 5: Data Integrity and Security, ~ 5Mb'.

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/web2apps/chapter/index.html

danw
Ahh, if only google notebook would actually structure the data in a pretty way just like your numbered citations
bootload
the question is ... can you extract your data?

Then you can do with it, what you like! This is the bane of my existence and I want to own this problem!

nostrademons
Cal addresses that by arranging his book in roughly the order that you should think about things. He recommends that you think about:

1. Version control

2. Issue tracking

3. One-click deploy

4. Internationalization

5. Security

before you start building your application, then you build and release it, then (and only then) start thinking about:

6. Email

7. Web services

8. Scalability

9. Statistics & monitoring

10. APIs

This mostly squares with my experiences (both with my own startup - currently on step 3, with 4, 5 and a launch-ready app already done - and working for others). The only changes I'd make are:

1. Move statistics and monitoring up the priority list, before launch. You want that data available to drive feature implementation.

2. I'm of two minds on internationalization. I think that most apps can wait until they're popular before they need to internationalize. However, i18n is really difficult to do later, after you've already built an app. I watched LiveJournal go through the process, and it wasn't pretty. So even though you don't need it, you may want to do it upfront because it'll be much harder later.

danw
Now I think I need this book. Your right about stats, I would move them to number 6 or perhaps even to prelaunch.
It seems like a lot of this information is pulled directly from Cal's book "Building Scalable Web Sites" (Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Building-Scalable-Web-Sites-Applications/dp/0596102356/). If you are interested in gaining some of the spoken context behind the slides, this is a great read. It was reviewed on slashdot a while back (http://books.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/07/26/1357210). If your venture is a site that is going to eventually need to scale due to high resource consumption from individual users (whether this be storage, CPU, or database requirements) I suggest you pick up a copy of this book to know how to better address this concern during design rather than in deployment!
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