Number of servers
I read at The Paradigm Shift (Hardware Sensitive Business models) that ebay use about 17,000 servers and macth.com use about 1,000 servers. Quite impressive, I wonder how many server admins are needed to manage that many servers. How are these and what exactly is monitorized? How often to they change HDs, memories, network cards, routers, etc.? How often do they upgrade the software? These are all questions that need to be asked before you plan to make a site that has the chances to become … the next internet boom.
Handling large amount of data requires optimal indexes and powerful servers, a lot of RAM especially. This is quite true with our B2B Network, TradeHolding.com as well. We only have about 125,000 members but although our databases are quite optimized, we constantly work on changing slow queries and rebuild indexes, tables where needed. We store a lot of information that help us better understand our members’ needs and requirements and the generated reports are sometimes slow.
But, we are definitely on the right way… 
November 22nd, 2006 at 2:16 am
“handling large amount of data requires optimal indexes and powerful servers, a lot of RAM especially”
Uh, no, not generally. *generally* databases are constrained by disk I/O rather than RAM. *generally* databases benefit most from fast disks (10-15k RPM) in a fast configuration (RAID 0+1 or 6) with a fast controller (128M+ cache). But generalizations may not apply to your environment, and measuring your actual load is the only way to know for sure
If you find yourself constantly optimizing indexes its time to think about denormalizing your data model, federating your database, or off-loading analytical data from operational data.
November 23rd, 2006 at 9:34 am
I’m going to join your TradeHolding.com