How to Kill Your Servers - Learning How to Scale the Hard Way

Wait... how about, "Stress-test before the changeover so that you see the bottlenecks before your customer does?"

Lesson #0: scalability is not a problem that can be solved exclusively in software.<p>Hire a sysadmin. And take his advice.

I'd KILL to have scalability issues... we had one band that said they were likely to sell several hundred thousand copies of their single using BitBuffet, which got me all excited, but that never came to pass. I honestly believed it might happen because: 1) they were donating the money to charity, 2) it was pay-what-you-want, and 3) they were pretty well known.<p>I was actually a little sad he didn't kill my cute little Linode server...

I'm a pretty big noob in the scaling world, but as I read the article I kept thinking, "With services out there like Heroku, isn't scaling something of a solved problem (at least with a Rails app)?" Do web startups still manually handle the scaling process?

"Almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching." --Terje Mathisen

"... and your servers will DIE!"<p>Di diyanu, di diyanu, di diyanu, diyanu, diyanu!