Question

I’m currently creating a website for a social project in switzerland.

And before there is an overflow of user, I want to prepare the application to scale.

I answered by myself many questions but some are left.

I explain what I want to do.

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First

at the beginnning, the Application will have only one server (short time) with DNS, PHP, Mysql, Data, and memcache.

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Second

Then I will split them in two

1. DNS, Mysql, memcache
2. Data, PHP

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Third

Here is the problem, I don’t know how to do it exactly here to keep the application running well.

I could do :

1. Front : Load Balancer, memcache, DNS
2. Web 1 : PHP, DATA
3. Web 2 : PHP, DATA
4. Mysql

This would be the scheme, all PHP sessions are kept in the DB.

BUT, how do I sync the data?
do I run a Rsync to keep them up to date.
do I put them on a separate disk (network disk) to be sure ?
but in this case, how can I do in case of user uploads ?

and if the website gets more success and we have to go on greater structures, would’nt it create some latency on updates ?

or would it be a good thing to go directly to amazon’s web services ?

some infos
I use codeigniter as Framework.
I use linux as webserver (distribution not chosen now, but should be Debian)

Thanks in advance for your answers.

Answer 1

According to Wikipedia, Switzerland has 4.6 million German speakers, 1.5 million French speakers, and .5 million speakers of Italian, Romansch and other languages. So I suspect you’ll find that a single server will fit your needs. Guess what percentage of the population will visit your site every month or every day to get a sense of how big you can get before running into scaling issues.

So, I don’t think you need to worry about scaling yet! Bonus: The time you don’t spend worrying about this problem, you can use to solve other problems for your users.