Disqus: Scaling the World’s Largest Django Application

Disqus is a classic case study when it comes to scalability.<p>If there is one thing I learned from Disqus it is the power of keeping a lightweight stack. Disqus keep it simple, and prove that all the myths that "Django/SQL/whatever doesn't scale" are obscene.<p>Even for an app with requests per second in the 5 digit range - they do pretty damn good with the basic Django stack with no more than some small tweaks.

Not like this is a problem I have to worry about. But where on earth does one learn this stuff?<p>The talk is useful - as an overview of what they use - but I know nothing of how to implement a single step.

Thank you so much for submitting that. I'm creating a Django application that has the potential to store and work with even more data than Disqus, so I've always been worrying about how to scale this to such a huge scale. Thanks to your submission, I'm no longer as crazed about it.

As an aside, AFAIK douban.com is still using Python and Quixote[1]. Back in 2007 they were doing 2 million pageviews per day[2,3]. According to Alexa they are busier yet now. They use the SCGI protocol as well.<p>1. <a href="http://quixote.ca/" rel="nofollow">http://quixote.ca/</a><p>2. <a href="http://mail.mems-exchange.org/durusmail/quixote-users/5441/" rel="nofollow">http://mail.mems-exchange.org/durusmail/quixote-users/5441/</a><p>3. <a href="http://mail.mems-exchange.org/durusmail/quixote-users/5657/" rel="nofollow">http://mail.mems-exchange.org/durusmail/quixote-users/5657/</a>

How does Disqus make money? Has IntenseDebate made money since being acquired? Does revealing this information make Disqus a more likely acquisition?

I know disqus does loads of traffic, but sheesh ~100 servers - thats exceptionally non-trivial.