It's not the language stupid





Wikipedia: cheap & exmplosive scaling with LAMP

  1. They’re now doing 3,500 page views per second and serving that off of about 100 servers.
  2. Wikipedia is LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP).
  3. They use 90% of memory in InnoDB buffer pool.
  4. This is laughable, their operational guideline is “general availability” as opposed to five nines. Their main operational goals are maximum efficiency and always be able to scale as people are always coming in. These are a direct result of them being a donation powered open source community site.
  5. They use aggregated tables for reports, which doubled overall performance. They also killed some metadata included on every page because it was too expensive to generate.

Overall, not very interesting. They don’t really tell how they’re scaling to that many requests with only 100 servers. I’ve found most of the short sessions missing any kind of meat as to exactly how these guys are scaling MySQL. The feeling I get is that most of them are doing exactly what I’ve been doing, which makes me rethink MySQL’s place in the “high performance” column of databases.