Building Large Scale e-Commerce Systems?

Fross asks: "I am Technical Architect at a reasonably large e-commerce firm, which naturally has a very large and active Website, with tens of thousands of registered users, and millions of page hits a month. The time has come to reimplement the old architecture from the ground up, and I'm looking for other (preferably Open Source, or Open Source-friendly) solutions that will give a faster, more scalable, more reliable, easily maintainable solution than the current implementation (which is running under ASP, on IIS of course). I have a fair amount of experience with Perl, some with PHP, but have never used them for something of this size. Does anyone have experience of deploying something this large with these technologies, and can give some valued information on how these solutions cope?"

Comments

Large scale systems

[PhiRatE]

Yep, been there, done that. Our particular solution revolved around a cluster of linux servers fronted by a linux/iptables layer-4 router and various custom stuff to perform rapid failover. The cluster nodes themselves used Apache with PHP4, with a database backend and rsync to distribute content to the cluster nodes from a distribution box.

In order to reduce the work, you could use a cisco localdirector or equivalent layer-4 switch instead of the iptables stuff, the rest should basically fit together almost out of the box.

This solution scales very well and handles millions of hits/month. Recommended additions are squid running as an accelerator, since it can absorb a significant number of hits that apache would otherwise have to deal with. However the addition of the Tux in-kernel web stuff on the cluster nodes would probably be an even more preferable solution.

Also recommend dual-cpu machines, they do really well with apache.