A Beginner's Guide to Scaling to 11M+ Users on Amazon's AWS

Re:A Beginner's Guide to Scaling to 11M+ Users on Amazon's AWS by falcolas on Tuesday January 12, 2016 @10:29AM (#10887914)

If the PHP responses are relatively static, adding a bit of caching in front of it will improve the responsiveness and decrease the load dramatically. Simply adding a 5 minute cache let us scale one PHP application from 100 concurrent to "SSL & gzip require more CPU than PHP". We figured that was sufficient.

More dynamic applications (like a commenting system) might feel better at 10-30 seconds of caching with expiration commands, but it will still help scale up significantly.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:A Beginner's Guide to Scaling to 11M+ Users on Amazon's AWS by miseg on Tuesday January 12, 2016 @11:23AM (#10888255)

By caching, you mean like script execution caching that PHP accelerators give? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_PHP_accelerators

Am I right in thinking that such caching comes built-in with PHP 5.5+ ?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:A Beginner's Guide to Scaling to 11M+ Users on Amazon's AWS by semerda on Tuesday January 12, 2016 @11:40AM (#10888405)

Look at Varnish Cache https://www.varnish-cache.org/ and Google's PageSpeed module on the server. https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/?hl=en

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:A Beginner's Guide to Scaling to 11M+ Users on Amazon's AWS by miseg on Tuesday January 12, 2016 @11:51AM (#10888473)

Thanks. That's quite added complexity in my scenario, which I think I would avoid.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:A Beginner's Guide to Scaling to 11M+ Users on Amazon's AWS by falcolas on Tuesday January 12, 2016 @01:26PM (#10889258)

Nginx and Apache have built in caching which can usually be easily enabled, which while arguably not as fast as using Varnish (Nginx in particular will serve cached content from disk using sendfile, as opposed to Varnish's in-memory caching) are still faster than calling back into PHP.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:A Beginner's Guide to Scaling to 11M+ Users on Amazon's AWS by semerda on Tuesday January 12, 2016 @04:14PM (#10890455)

PageSpeed is 1 liner installation on your instance. It will compress assets etc automatically as Apache serves them. Worth adding to your deployment script.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:A Beginner's Guide to Scaling to 11M+ Users on Amazon's AWS by miseg on Wednesday January 13, 2016 @04:25AM (#10893194)

Nice. I like how it could be installed in Apache, and then left to its own devices.

[ Parent | on HN ]