Sean Gilligan wrote:
Elias Torres wrote:
I work for IBM so I should be saying: yeah! let's throw more iron at the
problem and we'll be happier, but unfortunately more iron is not the
first thing we need here, good design/code is.
I agree, but I think that good design/code focused around cached dynamic
pages should meet most reasonable needs. (He says, carefully avoiding
the use of words like "any" or "unlimited"...)
To be honest, the way we have our caching (of rendered pages) on BSC
setup it is basically the same thing as serving static content. We use
memcached and our caches are maintained between app restarts, so the
only difference I see is that instead of dumping the rendered page to
the filesystem, we are dumping it into memory (which we have tons of).
I only have about 12GB of RAM for memcached and that is *way* overkill
for the 2200+ blogs that we run.
*snip*
MovableType on the other hand has delivered the
scale, but they have static content. Dynamic features are great but need
to be carefully thought out and used sparingly if you want to play in
the big leagues.
Do you believe there is a significant difference between well-designed
and coded cached dynamic content versus generation of truly static files?
not necessarily, but obviously there are some differences. depends on
the content and how you implement the caching.
I think that we already have the potential of getting
into so much trouble with our template system that it will be impossible
to estimate the amount of hardware and memory we'll need to handle our
sites.
I'd be interested in hearing more about these issues.
We have little control over each blog's performance and how
it affects the rest of the site.
this is definitely one of the things that is constantly churning in the
back of my mind as well. i have spent a fair amount of time working on
performance improvements for Roller and I think things have come a good
ways, but the one big black hole that I still perceive is in our
templating/rendering system.
as Elias said, we don't really have any control over it and a
potentially clueless (or malicious) user could really affect the whole
site. i'm not sure i have any ideas on what to do about that yet.
-- Allen
One last thing, I think we need to remember the Web 2.0 direction and
think about dynamic content differently other than with JSPs and
Velocity templates.
I agree. Which is one reason why I think we need view independence in
the blog UI layer.
-- Sean
