Flickr, PHP and that word… scaling

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Via Keith, Flickr and PHP (PDF) by Cal Henderson. Some interesting quotes;

- Stateless method-call APIs are easy to extend

- [Unicode] It

Written By:

Harry Fuecks

Harry has been working in corporate IT since 1994, with everything from start-ups to Fortune 100 companies. Outside of office hours he runs phpPatterns: a site dedicated to software design with PHP that aims to raise standards of PHP development. He also maintains Dynamically Typed: SitePoint's PHP blog.

 

{ 4 comments }

Anonymous May 2, 2006 at 3:26 pm

Normalization plus caching is the way to go. It’s a wonder flickr continues to function.

Derek Martin October 29, 2004 at 11:59 am

It’s easy to say that you should value proper normalisation over performance, but when your site is your only public face and only source of income, the reality is that you *must* put performance first. If users can’t see the site they can’t give you their money, and you can’t gain their respect.

“Waiting. Waiting. Gone.” – A. User.

gabe October 28, 2004 at 12:41 pm

We manage our code base (~100,000 – 150,000 lines of PHP) using CVS. Soon it will be subversion. Granted that does include a lot of HTML also…

Seems like the redundant data issue would be more trouble.

Why does this site pop up an ad when I click anywhere? Annoying!

ammar_ibrahim October 27, 2004 at 8:39 pm

Normalised data is for sissies … Keep multiple copies of data around … Makes searching faster

This is really harmfull, Having 13 SELECTs per I/U/D is a nightmare. I believe they will start having hard time with data integrity and consistency in the long run. I can’;t imagine how they keep track of all the redundant data that needs to be all the same.

In my opinion you should balance between normalization and denormalization, But what is discussed in the presentation doesn’t sound like a proper balance. I would highly recommend to have a clean & normalised design over performance. Buy more hardware, replicate, load balance, but don’t screw your db design.

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