Hello

I'm no database expert, and am interested in learning about how the experts manage to take a standard RDBMS-based web application where the DB server has maxed out, and improve performance so that the database is no longer the bottleneck (eg. sharding, moving some of the data out of the RDMBS and into a hashing DB, etc.)

I'm interested in good articles and books with newbie-accessible, pratical exemples on the different ways to increase performance.

Thank you.

Five years ago this was a common problem. Ten years ago it was a major problem. Today it is very rare.

What kind of application are you considering that might need this kind of scale? How big an audience do you imagine that you might need to support? The reason that I ask these questions is that they factor heavily in the decisions about how to manage database and application scaling.

-PatP

Thanks Pat.

It's a Facebook-like site, ie. lots of write accesses, with lots of user-specific data. The single MySQL server is down on its knees, with the front-end PHP app spending a lot of time waiting for I/O.

I'm looking for real-life solutions to moving from a single MySQL server to multiple DB servers.

How many total users do you have now? How many web sessions are active on the system at one time?

How much storage are you using now (in terrabytes)? How fast is that usage growing (what was this measurement for the last four quarters)?

Can the system tolerate some down time for the conversion, or does it have go stay "live" for the users (staying "live" will raise the cost by at least 10x).

How how many servers are in the app server farm now? How many web (http) servers are in the web server farm? Are the farms in one location or multiple locations?

-PatP

That's a lot of question

It' just a single LAMP server and the MySQL server (located on a second host) is maxing out on the hardware that's available from our hoster.

I'm looking for articles/books that would explain the different solutions people have come up with to scale out so that I know what my options are.

Are there good resources on the subjet that are accessible to non-DBA's?

Thank you.

Then the answer is simple. Find a hoster who will give you better hardware. It seems clear that you aren't at the scale where scaling out of the box is necessary. You are probably a long way from that point in fact.

However, elasticity (the ability to expand and contract the resources available) is a key feature of cloud computing solutions, on which you can find a huge amount of information online. However, it's not obvious why you would consider porting your database to the cloud - you just need a better service from your hoster.

Maybe hardware, maybe not.

Its also possible that he just has a poor database design or inefficient sql coding.