May 05 2008
Put the web server on a diet and increase scalability
HTTP Sessions allow us to develop web applications as if they were running on a desktop machine, making the web so much more useful. Although HTTP is a stateless protocol and there is a lot of work involved in providing this abstraction, web servers make it very easy to use — perhaps too easy. Taking a quote from Spiderman, with great power comes great responsibility. That is why misusing HTTP sessions is probably the number one obstacle to building scalable web sites today. Here are some tips how to consume HTTP sessions responsibly. Continue Reading »
It is fairly obvious that web site performance can be increased by making the code run faster and optimising the response time. But that only scales up to a point. To really take our web sites to the next level, we need to look at the performance problem from a different angle. 
One of the most important architectural decisions that must be done early on in a scalable web site project is splitting the data flow into two streams: one that is user specific and one that is generic. If this is done properly, the system will be able to grow easily. On the other hand, if the data streams are not separated from the start, then the growth options will be severely limited. Trying to make such a web site scale will be just painting the corpse, and this change will cost a whole lot more when you need to introduce it later (and it is “when” in this case, not “if”). 
Effective content caching is one of the key features of scalable web sites. Although there are several out-of-the-box options for caching with modern web technologies, a custom built cache still provides the best performance. 
