Large Scale Web Apps Built on Open Source

prostoalex writes "Brad Fitzpatrick presented at OSCON with on overview of his little project. Interesting facts about the evolution of the Livejournal back-end architecture."

Uh, the Web itself

[FunWithHeadlines]

"Large Scale Web Apps Built on Open Source"

Uh, like, you mean the Web itself? That's large scale, certainly was built, and is most certainly built on open source.

So, yeah, I reckon it can be done. I'm using the proof-of-concept to submit this comment.

Re:Get a clue

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a pervasive belief among the suddenly famous. IBM, MS, or Sun doesn't need this. It's the small website with a bright idea that is all of a sudden gaining popularity which goes through almost each of the stages described in this document.

This is for people with absolutely no budget and infinite traffic. This is how to live through that and come out winning like Brad apparently has.

Re:Get a clue

[Anonymous Coward]

A little harsh considering the guy's starting point, but it is true that most people / companies don't think things through. I put in a lot of startup web sites in the 90's, and used to give lectures on, among other things, why replicating databases doesn't scale. Looks like people still think that replicating databases is a solution, almost ten years later. It makes me glad I opted out of the e-com performance world, or I'd still be solving exactly the same problems.

Simple lessons:
-replicating database all over the place doesn't work
-adding lots of servers doesn't work unless the apps are designed to work that way
-object-relational and object databases are useful for a narrow class of problems, and Do Not Scale
-java/perl/etc. are great, but you have to learn some SQL because doing things like sorting data in code is stupid when the database is 10x faster doing on retrieval than your code
There's the material I used to get $2000 for for a 1 hour lecture. Share and enjoy.

Re:Salesforce.com

[Anonymous Coward]

$ HEAD http://www.salesforce.com|grep ^Server:
Server: Resin/3.0.s040331

Re:Get a clue

[Graelin]

You need to get over your favorite language/technology/term you read in the trade-rag you read last week. And then you need to get over yourself.

Give it up slashdot crowd. mod_perl is not a valid technology for a large scale website! Perl was designed for a task, and that task was NOT enterprise application development.

Spoken like someone who has never had to build a very large site (doing "real" work) completely in Perl/mod_perl. I can tell you that it most certainly can scale to enterprise needs. Did this guy do it right? I don't think so either but he most certainly learned a valuable lesson. Hopefully other people will study what he has done and improve their own systems based on his work.

For the record, Java wasn't built for enterprise application development either. As with Perl, people discovered that Java had a future there and here we are today.

A properly designed website with n-tier sepperation will be able to handle a large load and scale infinitly. You'll note that large websites who actually do real things besides logging people's daily problems don't use mod_perl and a thousand servers. There's a reason for this.

You're assuming two dangerous things... (1) That you can't have n-tier and Perl. And (2) that large mod_perl sites require lots of servers. To believe any of these things is to demonstrate your horrific misunderstanding of computer science in general. I pity the company that lets you design their architecture. Wait, no I don't.... I'll gladly take their money for fixing your mistakes.

Oh yeah, and let us not forget some other languages that are showing promise... specifically Python+Zope. In fact, I know of several people implementing n-tier applications with PHP on the front, Python in the middle and PostgreSQL in the back with much success.

And for the record, here [amazon.com] are [ticketmaster.com] some [etoys.com] large [rent.com] companies [find-job.net] and [redhat.com] sites [redhat.com] heavily [mobile.de] using [afp-direct.com] mod_perl [imdb.com].

Want more [apache.org]?

Re:Typical Livejournal

[RazzleFrog]

You left the best part out. She was upset because she got a D on the paper (from which that came) and she thinks she is a good writer. Her explanation, of course, is not that she has a greatly inflated opinion of her abilities but that he teacher is anti-Christian.

We laugh about this but the really scary part is that there are a lot of people who think like her. People hate Bush so much because of the war but I am much more scared about his connection to the zealots of the religous right. The war in Iraq will end someday but these zealots will continue to try to take control of this country.

Re:Typical Livejournal

[RazzleFrog]

A zealot would be somebody who blames their problems on somebody else's religion or lack of religion which is what this girl did. If you read what she posted of that essay I think even the most religous among us would still be generous giving her a D.

And the right likes to call the left communists. Calling them zealots wouldn't make much sense.

And I had nothing to do with making this girl think there are anti-christian views in this country. She gets plenty of that from the preachers. If you don't think that zealotry is very real in this country then I suggest you listen to Jimmy Swaggarts opinion of gay marraige. He said something along the lines that if a gay man looked at him wrong he would kill him and the crowd cheered. That is zealotry plain and simple.

Finally, I don't know how you can say religion is being removed from the public eye. You obviously don't watch much TV or visit the bookstore. Religion has had a huge resurgence since September 11. You can't watch a Yankees game without hearing God bless America. In my opinion America the Beautiful would be much more appropriate.