Your developers have created a brilliant new application, and you are new starting to get some traffic, but it is collapsing under the load, and you are having to throw hardware at the problem. A solution is at hand in the form of caching.
Varnish is the first thing to give your app some polish, it is relatively slow as a reverse proxy compared to lighttp or nginx, but a massive improvement over dotNet, Java or php. However these all use naïve caching where content is cached for a time out period and then checked again after the time out, so the load will soon over take you and you will need to move to the next level.
Intelligent caching has a number of levels so lets move to the top end the @UK Platform Generator Cache. The key differences are as follows:-
- Compressed content
- No time to live, but updating as content changes
- Html Block level compression and de-duplication
The result is that the @UK Platform Generator Cache can handle millions of pages per gig of memory and eliminates the issue of having to balance between out of date content and system load since it never needs to go back to the database/middle ware to check if the cache is stale, because the cache is kept up to date in real time.
The result is that @UK can provide customers with free infrastructure since even high volume customers do not produce a measurable load on the system. A typical customer using Php, java or dotNet for their web layer will see both web and database servers collapse before the @UK system starts to register a measurable load.
This means that @UK offers a migration service where it will provide an expanded infrastructure to the customer and some tuning to their application as part of an upgrade onto the @UK Platform, so that they can continue their expansion and then take the brakes off once they are on Platform Generator.
Ronald Duncan's Blog 