Scalable Internet Architectures

What’s So Tricky?

Static web serving doesn’t seem so difficult at first. And, in truth, it isn’t. However, as sites evolve and grow, they must scale, and the stresses of serving traffic in development and staging are different from those placed on an architecture by millions of visitors.

Let’s walk through a typical approach to serving a website and then investigate that approach for inefficiencies. First, how much of the traffic is static? The answer to this is the basis for numerous timing, throughput, and other scalability calculations. Table 6.1 shows four sites: three real sites (one very small site and two that are huge) and a fourth site that is an example large site for discussion purposes whose page composition metrics are legitimized ...