This Might Explain Why Twitter Is Down So Often

Reblogging:

Joyent published an article a month or so ago about how they scaled a facebook application to support millions of hits. The application, BumperSticker, simply serves out customized images to users – online bumper stickers. It’s not hard, not complex and processes around 20 to 27 million page views a day. That’s a good number by anyone’s standards.

But, this dinky little Ruby on Rails app required the following architecture to do it

• 13 Application servers.
• 8 Static content asset servers
• 4 MySql databases

Thats a staggering 25 servers just to serve a bunch of images at a rate of no more than 320 hits per second.