How to

Develop a
Heavy
Traffic
Web 2.0
Platform
Developing a Web Application requires considerable effort and
experience in website consulting. While there are many companies out
there offering website consulting services, not all of them offer
comprehensive 36 degrees of service. !ne of the "ey differences is the
ability to design the Web #latform than can scale easily as traffic grows
and support heavy traffic seamlessly without bringing down the entire
platform or effecting user experience in any way. $his document will
tal" about some of the most important things that should be done to
successfully develop a heavy traffic web platform.
1. Estimating Traffic - $he first and most important step is for the
software consultant is to understand the business requirements and
wor" with the client to estimates traffic over time, i.e. at launch, after 3
months, after 6 months, etc. $his includes both, the number of unique
users as well as number of overall page views. %n addition any special
traffic patterns li"e spi"es at particular time in the day, etc. An
experienced consultant will then use these along with other industry
standards to come up with a theoretical number for the requests per
second that the server needs to handle, and design the entire
application as well as the deployment strategy accordingly.
2. Storage Technologies and Optimizations - &ost
conventional web '. platforms are bac"ed by ()* databases to persist
the user + application data. ,owever, increasingly -o()* databases
.li"e &ongoD/0 are being used for enormous scalability and very quic"
loo"up. %f search is needed, especially as data grows, it is important to
have a search index and use a search server li"e Apache (olr that offers
great performance even with enormous amounts of data and can scale
linearly. &ost heavy traffic web platforms will employ a combination of
data technologies depending on the specific requirements and traffic
patterns of the application. #ic"ing the right technologies is only half
the wor". 1ood website consulting calls for actually designing the data
schema as well, along with other technology specific optimi2ations
according to the needs. $his step is extremely crucial in insuring
performance and scalability, especially for high traffic scenarios.
3. Loadtesting & Performance Tuning - While theory is very
important, it is essential to actually test the application .once ready0
with actual test data and test traffic to see how it handles the actual
load. $his is done by first creating test data and then using scripts to
3loadtest4 the system 5 i.e. imitate various user actions on the server by
sending it multiple requests simultaneously. /oth data si2e as well as
requests per second are varied, and response time and other server
metrics monitored, to come up with an accurate prediction on how the
system will scale and handle increased traffic. During this process, in
case any inefficiency or poor metrics are observed .when comparing to
expectations0, performance tuning is performed, which include things
li"e database index manipulation, code optimi2ation and various other
techniques.
. !eplo"ment Strateg" & #onitoring - /ased on the traffic
estimates and the loadtesting results the web application consulting
company will then come up with a solid deployment plan for the launch.
$his includes designing the deployment architecture and figuring out
the various servers, their specifications and number, and other
considerations li"e bandwidth, redundancy + failover, etc. 6urther,
server monitoring will be set up to monitor "ey server metrics,
customi2ed for each server7type8 and alerts set up in case a certain
threshold is breached. *astly, a scaling plan will be in place that will
dictate how and when to increase the number of servers or change the
configuration or even introduce new layers + servers as traffic
increases.
As you can see developing a heavy traffic web platform requires
extensive "nowledge and valuable experience in this space. (o, ma"e
sure to use an competent and experienced software consulting company
when developing such a platform to insure success.
$ontact !etails
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