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Large Scale Web Apps Built on Open Source

Posted by michael on from the running-out-of-south-park-characters dept.

prostoalex writes "Brad Fitzpatrick presented at OSCON with on overview of his little project. Interesting facts about the evolution of the Livejournal back-end architecture."

3 of 213 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Java, Tomcat, Apache on UNIX by Kainaw · · Score: 4, Interesting

    We are using Fedora, Postgres, and PHP for what I consider a rather large-scale application. It is a storage and query system for research on a few million patients. We could have gone with Oracle and Java (...shiver...), or even MSSQL and a Windows server, but why waste money? The only real headache I've had is figuring out that Apache2 is threaded and Postgres/PHP sits on top of some low-level linux code that is not. I could use Apache instead of Apache2 to fix the problem, but I fixed the non-threaded code instead.

    --
    The previous comment is purposely vague and generalized, but all of the facts are completely true.
  2. Porn by Neil+Blender · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Back in the .com days, I worked at a huge (now defunct) porn site. We had about 50,000 active hosted sites, 500,000 hit counters and a bunch of other stuff. We were getting tens of millions of page views daily, maxing out two 100 megabit circuits at times. It was all FreeBSD, a little Redhat, Perl, mysql, squid, apache, mod_perl and C. The only real closed stuff we used were BigIPs and traffic monitoring software.

  3. Re:Large scale? by xb95 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Most of the time those numbers are four or more times that high. It's early in the afternoon, this isn't a peak time.

    Anyway, those are only the number of entries being posted. For every entry being posted, there are a ton of inserts actually going on:

    * log2 table to contain some metadata about the entry
    * logtext2 table to contain the actual text
    * logprop2 table (multiple rows, 3-5) containing other metadata about entry

    So, four times the traffic, about 6 inserts each, 2400 updates per second--and that's just for posting entries. We get a lot more traffic from people posting comments (which also do 3 or 4 update/inserts each comment), plus people editing their userinfo, uploading new userpics, ...

    While LiveJournal definitely isn't a huge site, it's not a lightweight, and definitely doing pretty good for having around 80 machines and doing 30-40 million fully dynamic page views a day.