InfoQ Homepage Scalability Content on InfoQ
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Building Scalable Web Services
Tom Killalea, Vice President of technology with responsibility for infrastructure and distributed systems engineering at Amazon.com wrote an article on ACM queue on building scalable web services. He outlines guiding principles to building scalable web services with a lot of real-world examples, the core theme of which is “build only what you need”.
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Memcached Roundup: Memcached 1.4 Released, Gear6's WebCache
Memcached has recently been released in version 1.4 which added new features like the binary protocol. Also: WebCache is a Memcached protocol-compliant hardware solution to boost performance even more.
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Presentation: Three Years of Real-World Ruby
Martin Fowler talks about ThoughtWorks's experience with using Ruby on client projects for the past three years, and the creation of a Ruby-based product 'Mingle'.
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Goat Rodeo: A Unified Data Model for Web Applications
David Pollak, found of the Lift web framework and "Beginning Scala" author, has announced a new initiative "Goat Rodeo" that aims to bring data modeling into the 21st century.
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Rich Hickey on Clojure's Features and Implementation
In this interview from QCon London 2009, Rich Hickey talks about Clojure. The discussion includes the ideas behind Clojure's STM support, what other concurrency primitives Clojure supports and which ones might get added in the future. Other topics covered are Clojure's AOT support, the role and implementation of multimethods, Clojure ports to other systems and much more.
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Performance Roundup: Heap Stacks Boost Threads in 1.8.x, MacRuby AOT, ZenProfile and EventHooks
New patches by Joe Damato improve the efficiency of Ruby 1.8.x's green threads with heap stacks: instead of copying the entire stack at every context switch, the patches actually switch between different stacks. Ryan Davis released zenprofile and event_hook for efficient profiling. Also: work on a MacRuby Ahead of Time compiler using LLVM has started.
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Flex: Engine Yard's New Cloud Offering
Engine Yard announced Flex at this year's Rails Conf. Flex runs on Amazon's EC2, but unlike its smaller brother Solo, Flex scales over more than one instance. We talked to Michael Mullany, VP of Marketing at Engine Yard to get more information.
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Erlang and Ruby Roundup: 37Signals, Erlectricity
37Signals is the latest company to use Erlang in combination with Ruby. The recent Erlang Factory conference also had other examples of Erlang use at EngineYard as well as a talk about Erlectricity, the library that connects Erlang and Ruby.
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Heroku's Provisionless Hosting for Rails Apps is Revolutionary
Heroku debuted a commercial version of their Rails hosting solution last week, after a free beta stage that lasted over a year. Using Heroku, deployment of a new Ruby web application from scratch is accomplished with little more than a handful of commands from your terminal. No emails, phone calls or support tickets needed.
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Presentation: Financial Transaction Exchange at BetFair.com
Betfair is the world's largest betting exchange with a transaction volume the equivalent of over half the combined equity trading volume of every major stock exchange in the world. In response to an increase in transaction volume coupled with a decrease in value per transaction, Betfair launched a number of initiatives to dramatically increase transaction processing capacity and reduce cost.
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Interview: Gregg Pollack and the How-To of Scaling Rails
In this interview with Gregg Pollack of Rails Envy Podcasts, Robert Bazinet talks with Gregg about the issues around scaling Rails, his involvement with New Relic and the creation of the Scaling Rails screencast series as well as other keys to scaling Rails.
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Article: Using the Concurrency and Coordination Runtime
Nick Gunn provides a practical introduction Using the Concurrency and Coordination Runtime. CCR radically changes the way multi-threaded applications are written in .NET, shifting the focus from threads and locks to lightweight, asynchronous tasks. The Concurrency and Coordination Runtime, also known as CCR, offers actor-style concurrency for .NET applications.
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The Clouds Can Do Mathematics
Wolfram Research has announced the availability of its product, Mathematica 7, to perform computations using cloud computing services from within the application. Mathematica is a computing environment providing support for numerous numeric and symbolic computations through a dedicated symbolic language.
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Smooth HTTP Caching With Rack::Cache
The ways to cache a web application are numerous and often complex. Apart from the very basic page caching, Rails 2.2 introduced conditional GET through the use of HTTP headers: last_modified and etag. Following most of the internet standard caching section of RFC2616, Ryan Tomayko released Rack::Cache.
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Event Stream Processing: Scalable Alternative to Data Warehouses?
Dan Pritchett suggests that analyzing streams of events using Event Stream Processor could be an interesting alternative solution to data warehousing applications, which have, in his opinion, important downsides in terms of cost, scalability and reactivity.