This is a look at all the bad things that can happen to your carefully crafted program as loads increase: all hell breaks lose. Sure, you can scale out or scale up, but you can also choose to program better. Make your system handle larger loads. This saves money because fewer boxes are needed and it will make the entire application more reliable and have better response times. And it can be quite satisfying as a programmer.

Russell (AKA Jak Sprats) has been pondering, considering, and implementing distributed databases for many years. In a recent email conversation he shared 44 of the lessons he has learned from developing the infrastructure for high performance / highly scalable systems. Some are well known, some are debatable, and some obviously result from a deep experience that is worth learning from:

This page is for references to signed quotes of deployments of large triples stores rather than predictions of what some software might scale to

Deca is a language designed to provide the advanced features of sophisticated, high-level programming languages while still programming as close as possible to the bare metal. It brings in the functional, object-oriented, and generic programming paradigms without requiring a garbage collector or a threading system, so programmers really only pay in performance for the features they use.

This paper discusses the use of formal methods in the development of the control system for the Maeslant Kering. The Maeslant Kering is the movable dam which has to protect Rotterdam from floodings while, at (almost) the same time, not restricting ship traffic to the port of Rotterdam. The control system, called BOS, completely autonomously decides about closing and opening of the barrier and, when necessary, also performs these tasks without human intervention.

Abstract For research insights and development potential,we should explore computer architectures designed to scale indefinitely. Given physical limits, we argue an indefinitely scalable computer should or must (1)reveal to programmers its component spatial relationships,(2) forego unique addresses, and(3) operate asynchronously.

Mongrel2 is an application, language, and network architecture agnostic web server that focuses on web applications using modern browser technologies

A web page is an ecosystem where multiple objects contribute to the web page content, and as a result to its slowness or even unavailability. Some of the slowness can be due to poor server performance but at times is due to DNS related issues.

On the performance side the picture is a bit different. By leaving SQL query writing to an ORM, you are faced with complex queries that the database cannot optimize well. What's more ORMs don't allow easy tweaking of queries, slowing down the tuning process further.

If working on a significantly large JavaScript application, remember to dedicate sufficient time to planning the underlying architecture that makes the most sense. It's often more complex than you may initially imagine.