Slashdot Mirror
Managing Site Growth?
markmcb asks: "I started a web site about two years ago. When it began it was simple. The code was 75% hacked, and administration was easy. However, the times they are a changin'. Now I get hundreds of thousands of hits and have a steady flow of new users. I'm noticing an ever-increasing gap in terms of my site's popularity and its technological progression. Specifically, I have all sorts of 'XYZ for Beginners' books that are no longer of use to me. Even the so-called non-beginner publications seem to only scratch the surface of running a site. As problems get more complex, trying to Google every situation/issue I have with site administration has become less useful as well. I'm finding things like writing optimal code, configuring servers for high-volume, balancing ad income vs. server costs, and maximizing the efficiency from my moderation team have all become issues and that aren't addressed most books. What is the best way for a low-income, non-professional, but enthusiastic web designer/administrator like myself to manage site growth as it leaves the realm of just-for-fun?"
"Scalable" and "customized" are two things that when put together simply require a professional. And quite a lot of people calling themselves "professional" can't handle it, either.
Now, by "professional" I don't necessarily mean a degreed guy who makes at least $X thousand a year with Y years of experience. What I mean is, you're stepping into the domain where you can't hardly acquire the experience and skills necessary with anything less than full dedication usually brought on by having a job in the relevant domain.
There is, however, one other possibility for you to consider. If you analyze your needs and the available packages for your type of website, you may find that you can drop the "customized" aspect of it, if you can find a project close enough to your needs to require only minimal customization, perhaps even no actual code customization. Then you just need to import the data, and you will presumably have satisfied yourself that this package can meet your performance needs.
If the website you are referring to is the "OmniNerd" site you have a link to, then I would imagine this should be feasible. There are a lot of "news" packages, free and otherwise, and at least on first blush I don't see anything particularly unique about it. It looks an awful lot like slash, although from what I've heard that's not the easiest thing to customize. (slash hackers feel free to comment.)
Really, there's no excuse nowadays to start a new web framework from scratch, and your first impulse if your hack-job is starting to come apart at the seams should be to change to one of the umpteen bajillion tested, performant frameworks. Depending on your skill levels, which you did anything but talk up, you may even be missing basic pieces like caching, which is pretty important on a site like that. Non-professionals should not attempt to write website caching routines. Unless you want to go insane. (It's not that it's hard to write... it's that it's hard to get correct, and debugging cache problems are close to sheer hell.)
You haven't elaborated much on your situation. To be honest, the scalability and technology available to you has a lot to do with what platform you're using. The initial design of a data-driven web site ultimately determines how easy, securely and efficently it will be to evolve to meet changing needs and increased demand.
Open source technology tends to be more scalable and solid, but even there, a bad choice stifles your progress. If money is no object, I guess you can always scale up, but the commercial platforms often have their admins spending more time patching and maintaining the status quo than progressing. The bigger question is: Did you do your homework when you initially designed the system? If you're stuck, that's likely the problem.
If you have a choice to redesign or redeploy your site, what you need to do is ask yourself, not whether or not the technology you're familiar with can do what you want, but instead, are you using the right technology to do what you want?
I agree with your point, but not your example. Wikimedia is built on Mediawiki which is poorly written PHP+Memcached+MySQL saved by SquidCache. They need twice as many boxes as a well-designed architecture would need. Another bad example is MySpace which is a coldfusion/asp.net shop that add dozens of servers a day to keep up with demand. Most people estimate that they need 5 times as many boxes.
Adding more hardware is always a way to dig yourself out of a digg, but be careful you don't just look at how the big boys do it and think that's right. Smart people can do more with less. Look to Python, Perl, C# (but not ASP.Net unless you really know what you're doing) who have mature libraries. PHP and Coldfusion suffer too much from the type of app that's built-up and destroyed on every page load. It doesn't encourage separation from what only need to be done once (app initialisation) and page response, which is a large part of optimisation (both in doing things every page load that should be done once, and seperating out the page data and having layers of cache from the DB and web-templating). Learn about http headers and SquidCache.
So far as software recommendations I'd say Python with CherryPy and Kid Templates (but not turbogears). It's fast and simple.
1) Have fun.
2) Allow posting comments on your stories.
3) When people abuse comments, put in moderation system to stop them.
4) Hire some random writers with axes to grind, like "Geeks are oppressed by stupid conformist society".
5) When people abuse moderation points, throw in meta-moderation system to stop them.
6) Hype yourself up, claiming you are part of some revolution in media that will bring control to the masses.
7) Sell out to some venture capitalists.
8) Abuse moderation and metamoderation system yourself when comments piss you off.
9) Cover the site in more ads than Times Square.
10) Stop putting any effort into the site whatsoever.
11) Let people pimp their own blogs in story submissions.
12) Charge money to preview stories so people can read links before hordes of visitors take sites down, a problem you caused in the first place.
13) Charge money to view the site without ads.
14)???
15).... profit!
As you can see, the main goal of the Slashdot Method is to cause problems yourself, then charge people money to fix them. But remember, the most important step is to have fun! Hope you have as much success as they did!
I run a community website which is written in Perl with a MySQL back end.
Despite having just under 5000 users I had 3million hits last month, and shifted 13 Gb of traffic. Not bad for a single (dedicated) host!
There are two things that I'd suggest above all:
I use Danga's memcached which has a perl interface, but there are PHP ones too. This allows me to sensibly cache database queries (don't forget to test things to make sure you expire the cache appropriately!)
A combination of minimising queries and caching has kept me going even under a slashdotting.
If you have written the site code yourself I'd urge you to add a test suite. My site runs a full test suite every day, and I run it manually whenever I make changes - this allows me to be sure that I'm not breaking things when I make changes.
Of course the standard development model of having a "live" site and a "test" site help here too. I develop the code on a laptop and store it under version control (CVS in my case, but it doesn't matter which system you use as long as you pick one) and only when it has passed the test suite do I push it to the live site.
Adding extra hardware can be an option for bigger sites, but I'm not at that point now. I had my biggest strain when the site reached around 1000 users, since then things keep ticking over nicely, and although it is growing it isn't growing terribly quickly which suits me fine. (There are a lot of users who visit the site via google searches and never register/return; I'd like to fix that, but I don't mind too much!)