Techniques for writing a scalable website

Question

I am new in the website scalability realm. Can you suggest to me some the techniques for making a website scalable to a large number of users?

Answer 1

The biggest problem for scalability is usually shared resources like DBMS's. The problem arises because DBMS's usually have no way to relax consistency guarantees.

If you want to increase scalability when you use something like MySQL you have to change your schema design to relax consistency.

For instance, you can separate your database schema to have your normalized data model for writes, and a replicated read only denormalized part for the 90% of read operations. The read only data can be spread over several servers.

Another way to increase scalability of a database is to partition the data, e.g. separate the data into a database for every department and aggregate them either in the ORM or in the DBMS.