This past week I have been working with 2 Web2.0 startups -
members of Sun Startup Essentials, they get the
support for free - that are looking at improving the response
time of their web site.
We've been working at understanding how they servers behave today
and what could prevent their application to scale, which led me
to show how to run a quick diagnostic on an existing system and
to restate some key fundamentals in terms of scalability.
Let's start by the fundamentals.
Any piece of software is nothing else than a set of instructions
that need 2 things: computing units to execute on, and a fast
access to data.
Computing units are available in the form of a hardware threads
located on a processor. The number of threads that a server makes
available to the application depends on the number of processors
on the server, the number of …
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