we're currently getting about 30M hits a month on our API
If you're getting a million API requests a day, you can probably handle that load with a single machine. Indeed, it looks like they are using just one load balancer machine, one app server, and one db server. I'm not sure why the load balancer is even necessary. It's cool to hear this story, readers should just keep in mind that this is not really a "web scale" deployment.
Yea a million requests per day is almost nothing and could certainly be easily served by ANY RDBMS using ANY front-end technology from a single server.
In the setup described here (it has changed a bit in the 6 months since this article was written) Varnish was being used primarily for caching and sending needed requests to the single application server. Calling it a load balancer at that point was a simple misnomer.
Today we still have Varnish at the front of our stack for caching and also use it as a load balancer for a handful of application servers.
Traffic spikes heavily in the evenings, when people are watching TV. You're still right, but the point isn't necessarily that we're currently scaled out, but that I think we could with this setup.
We've since added several app servers, and done some heavy load testing. I should probably do a follow-up with some new results.
Does anyone know what the difference in performance between a MongoDB that stores its entire data in memory, and a SQL Server (MSSQL, Oracle, Mysql, Postgres, etc) that stores its entire data in memory? Is the performance for MongoDB faster than the corresponding SQL server?
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[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 47.7 ms ] threadwe're currently getting about 30M hits a month on our API
If you're getting a million API requests a day, you can probably handle that load with a single machine. Indeed, it looks like they are using just one load balancer machine, one app server, and one db server. I'm not sure why the load balancer is even necessary. It's cool to hear this story, readers should just keep in mind that this is not really a "web scale" deployment.
Today we still have Varnish at the front of our stack for caching and also use it as a load balancer for a handful of application servers.
We've since added several app servers, and done some heavy load testing. I should probably do a follow-up with some new results.
http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=2861821
His feed just refreshed in my feed reader... And I use news.yc as a bookmarklet to save interesting stuff.
Sorry bout that.
And SQL doesn't?