Preconceived Notions

Scaling on Rails is hard is a preconceived notion

Rails is not inherently difficult to scale

The Story

Twitter started as side-project of Odeo

South-by-southwest... not sure what this is

Traffic spike happened unexpectedly in March

Configuration

Just one database (master/slave - slave for reporting)

32 cores - sun machines

120 mongrels

16GB of memcache

MySQL on one 8 core box

Traffic

200-300 connections / seconds

800 spike per second

MySQL 2,400 queries/second

Solution

memcache!!!

cache-fu

extended cache stats

custom API caching

complex issues of caching of data because data is different for each users

 

 

Examples

denormalize  ...didn't understand this

 

Starling... distributed queuing system - written from scratch (aren't there others?)

...something about how fast disk access is...

 

Advice

Talk to other people in the community