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Learning High-Availability Server-Side Development?
fmoidu writes "I am a developer for a mid-size company, and I work primarily on internal applications. The users of our apps are business professionals who are forced to use them, so they are are more tolerant of access times being a second or two slower than they could be. Our apps' total potential user base is about 60,000 people, although we normally experience only 60-90 concurrent users during peak usage. The type of work being done is generally straightforward reads or updates that typically hit two or three DB tables per transaction. So this isn't a complicated site and the usage is pretty low. The types of problems we address are typically related to maintainability and dealing with fickle users. From what I have read in industry papers and from conversations with friends, the apps I have worked on just don't address scaling issues. Our maximum load during typical usage is far below the maximum potential load of the system, so we never spend time considering what would happen when there is an extreme load on the system. What papers or projects are available for an engineer who wants to learn to work in a high-availability environment but isn't in one?"
As discussed in the previous article in this series, JSON is a useful format for Ajax applications because it allows you to convert between JavaScript objects and string values quickly. In this final article of the series, you'll learn how to handle data sent to a server in the JSON format and how to reply to scripts using the same format.
I have a question sort of along the same line. I interviewed for a position at a very large internet company, and one of their primary concerns was very high performance and scalability. I went through the phone interviews and then the in-person interviews, and I actually did quite well, and was even told that I did quite well. However, in the end, I was told that while I did well, they would have liked to see more experience with very large web applications (I've worked at smaller companies). So, how do I go about learning something I think I already know, and from your experience, was that not the real reason I was not accepted?
Sorry this is a bit off-topic; I've just been dying to ask the slashdot community and this seems to be the most appropriate forum for the question.