Learning from Livejournal.com

Having just read a presentation by one of the key developers at livejournal.com, about how they scaled up their technology as their userbase rocketed, I’m thinking about this site.

Obviously not in a sense of it having anywhere NEAR as much traffic, but there’s certainly things I can do to improve performance.

Particularly - and this is bad - there is no server-side caching, at least on the dynamic pages. Well, I knocked it up in a weekend so it’s not fully there yet!

Funny thing is it will probably take about 5 mins to re-code requests so they first check for objects in the application context, and only THEN hit the database if necessary. Obviously I’ll need to repopulate this context object when I do an update, or when the app is reloaded.

I wouldn’t expect ANY visible change in performance as this site probably only has hits from me right now(!), but it’s just another thing ticked off.

Here is a link to the livejournal.com presentation.