The Tlog - a technology blog

No, I’m not talking about my sex life, or anything like that. It’s just this: I’ve never had a site in the past that had too much success for its own good, and that, therefore, had scalability problems. Each one of my sites has either used some popular, usually well optimized software (say, WordPress or MyBB), or was mostly a bunch of static HTML pages. Neither of which, I believe, have “scalability “problems; the Internet connection or the web server itself (due to the number of simultaneous requests, not really related to what the app does) will complain long before “scalability” enters into it. And, sorry to say, except for a bunch of occasional Digg / Shoutwire / Stumbleupon / Reddit effects, none of my sites was ever truly “stressed”.

That, I hope, is about to change.

For my next project (which is about 75% complete) is a site that may well have scalability problems. Which is good, because I’ll learn about them, and how to cope with them.

What’s that project about? It’s a surprise. Suffice to say that, as far as I know, there’s only another one out there, and, weeks ago, it had to shut down its “free” version because it couldn’t deal with its success. On its first days it was quick, then soon it changed into “don’t wait; we’ll email you when the report is ready” mode, and finally the free version went under.

Now, I’m not a full-blown company, I’m “just zis guy, you know”, and I don’t believe I’ll have as much success as that one has / had. But… there is a demand; what happened to it is proof of that. And it’s quite possible that my code won’t scale.

I kind of hope it doesn’t.