Ask HN: How do you scale your web app?

5 points·tonyrice··5 comments

What methods and Techniques do you guys use to scale your web applications? What languages do you find are most scalable?

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I recommend these two books:

- Scalability Rules: 50 Principles for Scaling Web Sites by Martin L. Abbott & Michael T. Fisher

- Building Scalable Web Sites: Building, Scaling, and Optimizing the Next Generation of Web Applications [Paperback] by Cal Henderson

I think they are the best resources I have found about the topic. If you are using .Net, like me this is book has good tips as well:

- Ultra-Fast ASP.NET: Build Ultra-Fast and Ultra-Scalable web sites using ASP.NET and SQL Server by Richard Kiessig

I don't think it has much to do with languadge, it is true some languages run slower than others, but these days almost all the languages have a variant that run in one of the VM's which most would agree are scalable.

To me scalability is all about architecture, and the #1 item that you can do to architect a scalable system is statelessness.

I use PHP, 350KB total of PHP+HTML code, you can have a look, I dont know how to post urls http://www.whatsthesequency.com/cookie.php

I run my ruby apps (sinatra and rails) on heroku and scale with a couple mouse clicks.

You can also run a ton of other languages on heroku now too.

this website has some GREAT content: http://highscalability.com/

Many articles focus on bigger, high-profile companies with unique challenges but there are tons of great articles and tips on scaling normal web apps. Check the archives.

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