There are a lot of scalability challenges we see with clients over and over. The list could easily include 20, 50 or even 100 items, but we shortened it down to the biggest five issues we see.
1. Tune those queries
By far the biggest bang for your buck is query optimization. Queries can be functionally correct and meet business requirements without being stress tested for high traffic and high load. This is why we often see clients with growing pains, and scalability challenges as their site becomes more popular. This also makes sense. It wouldn't necessarily be a good use of time to tune a query for some page off in a remote corner of your site, that didn't receive real-world traffic. So some amount of reactive tuning is common and appropriate.
Enable the slow query log and watch it. Use …
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