What is the best scalable modern architecture for high volume website (Java)

Question

We have a website that receives more than 1 million hits per day.

The site runs the old architecture (Struts Tomcat Hibenate MySQl) without real scalability.

Now, as we expand further, I am looking for a modern (not too bleeding paint) web architecture.

My first thoughts were to use the Google App Engine, but I'm not sure if this is open enough.

Our developers are all Java, so it would be easy to find them easily.

Ideally, I would like to work just like DIGG, Twitter, Amazon, etc.

If you know how they do it - or I have a suggestion, I would be very interested to know.

Answer 1

If you have the main design bottlenecks, then hardware will almost always be the best way to scale.

By "best" I mean

• cheap
• quick
• maximum increase in productivity
• guaranteed results

Does your current installation seem to be having problems? Can you give any information on what problems you have?

Edit: can you provide information on the current hardware setup? How many web servers (supposedly running Apache?), How many application servers, how many database servers?

Answer 2

I would have exhausted all the opportunity “without a real opportunity for scalability” before rewriting my application. This may mean that you can scale only horizontally, throwing more hardware and clustering in case of problems.

The Google App Engine will mean JPA instead of Hibernate and MySQL because I believe they use BigTable in the back.

Answer 3

See if you can cheaply cluster with Terracotta.

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To rewrite: take a look at what is already present in Java EE 6. You may find that it suits your needs. Glassfish 3.1 will support clustering before you finish rewriting.

Answer 4

Hire a team or even better a company that has experience building scalable solutions. Assist existing developers in business intelligence and assist scalable business experts in business logic.