Building Scalable Websites
I was delighted to see Cal Henderson's Building Scalable Websites on Amazon's computer book bestseller list this morning. Cal's talk, How We Built Flickr, has become legendary, and the book captures many of the same insights about how to build software for Web 2.0.
(Image updated 7/31 at 12:30 -- originally at #19, the book is at #11 right now.)
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I will be interested to read this book, as I am a Web performance consultant.
HOWEVER, I find the idea of using Flickr as an example of how to scale interesting, as it breaks a fundamental rule in the field: never use non-persistent connections.
Glad to see some non-academic sources are discussing scalability; but I would love the team at Flickr to let us in on the reason why they have disabled HTTP persistence on static.flickr.com
smp
Stephen:
It's for a couple of different reasons, but one is that image requests are balanced via URL Hash (layer7) amongst different caching servers, so the requests rarely hit the same server with multiple requests. The balancer should be able to actually handle this, but it's not the mode that it's in at the moment.
The other reason is that if it weren't doing Layer7 balancing, the caching server doesn't actually have full HTTP/1.1 support yet.
But wait! This will all probably change in the near future due to some of these things going away or changing.
cheers!
John Allspaw
