The rise of the social networking phenomenon has spurred demand for a highly
scalable and fexible solution for hosting applications. Many larger sites are
growing at 100% a year, and smaller sites are expanding at an even more rapid
pace, doubling every few months. Such rapid growth in user population requires a
highly fexible and scalable infrastructure. Today, many sites are using open source
solutions and platforms as a way to ensure applications can scale as needed.
Many developers and deployers use extremely simple static fle retrieval tests to
evaluate Web servers, often leading to erroneous conclusions. Understanding the
challenges faced by Web 2.0 customers, Sun created Olio. Developed by engineers
with years of experience and understanding related to the complexities associated
with creating multitier workloads, Olio provides a realistic workload that can help
test the performance and scalability of Web 2.0 technologies. This Sun BluePrints™
article describes a reasonably sized, scalable Web 2.0 deployment. Olio helped
validate and tune the solution, resulting in several best practices for deployment.
solution overview
This article uses the Olio application to showcase a deployment. Olio is a Web
2.0 toolkit for evaluating the suitability, functionality, and performance of Web
technologies1
. The application provides an events site similar to popular social
networking sites on the Internet, featuring photos, calendars, and shared comment
feeds. It includes common Web 2.0 features, such as Asynchronous JavaScript
and XML (AJAX), tagging, tag clouds, comments and ratings, friends, feeds, and
more. In addition to the structured data in a relational database, Olio uses a large
unstructured dataset with items such as photos and documents, as well as a caching
tier that is typical of Web applications. The Olio toolkit also includes the tools
needed to drive load against the application in order to measure performance.
An open source Apache software incubator project, Olio provides three
implementations of the same application using three different technology stacks:
PHP, Rails, and the Java™ Platform, Enterprise Edition (Java™ EE platform). The
deployment described in this article uses the PHP implementation of Olio deployed
on commonly used open source technologies that are popular with Web 2.0 sites.
These technologies include:
• Apache HTTP Server
The Apache HTTP Server is a widely-used, open source Web server that powers
many small to medium sized Web sites. The Apache HTTP Server typically is
deployed in a multiprocess mode (MPM-prefork) with the mod_php software
module for PHP-based applications.
• PHP
PHP is a scripting language used for Web applications. An open source version of
the PHP runtime is available and used with the Apache HTTP Server as part of the
popular Apache HTTP Server, MySQL™ database, and PHP (AMP) stack.
• APC
APC is a widely used, open source implementation of a caching and optimizing
accelerator for PHP that can help improve PHP performance.Sun Microsystems, Inc. 3 Deploying Web 2.0 Applications
• Memcached
Memcached is an open source distributed caching system that is used to reduce
the load on back-end databases, and is the de-facto standard for Web applications.
• MySQL database
MySQL database server is a popular open source relational database management
system that is developed, distributed, and supported by Sun. The MySQL software
delivers a fast, multithreaded, multiuser, and robust SQL database server that
can be used to deliver e-commerce, online transaction processing (OLTP), and
multiterabyte data warehousing (DW) applications. A fully integrated, transaction-
safe, ACID-compliant database with full commit, rollback, crash recovery, and row-
level locking capabilities, MySQL database provides ease of use, scalability, and
performance for Web 2.0 applications.
database servers
The database was deployed using MySQL database replication on three Sun Fire
X4170 servers, confgured as one master and two slaves. The Sun Fire X4170
server delivers density, high performance, and energy effciency in a compact
1U form factor. Incorporating two Intel Xeon Processor 5500 Series processors,
HyperThreading and QuickPath Interconnect technology, up to eight 2.5-inch disk
drives, four Gigabit Ethernet ports, energy effciency enhancements, and enterprise-
class reliability, availability, and serviceability (RAS) features, these servers are well-
suited for database and Web 2.0 infrastructure deployments. Sun Microsystems, Inc. 5 Deploying Web 2.0 Applications
The Sun Fire X4170 servers used for the testing effort included two quad-core Intel
Xeon E5540 processors running at 2.53 GHz and confgured with 8 MB cache, 24 GB of
memory, and eight 146 GB capacity SAS disk drives. One network interface was used
for all traffc between the Web application and the database